beautiful, unfinished: parable, song, canto, poem by M.T.C Cronin
Salt Publishing, 2003
WOW! I had to read beautiful, unfinished 16 times before I had enough courage to even begin thinking about reviewing it. Cronin wields language like an ax with scented blade, its hits your brain with a squishy sounding clunk but it's so pretty you want to make out with it.
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In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter's Children by Phil Hammial
Island Press Co-operative, 2004
Who is Philip Hammial? If you read Hammial's 16th book of poems, it will strike you as surprisingly biographical without sounding too auto-biographical – after all it's Philip Hammial poetry. Who is Philip Hammial, the poet? What's his world?
Dan Disney, The Velocity of Night Falling
Hit & Miss Publications, 2003
It's reasonable to suggest that we live in somewhat Tragicomic times. A well-known satirist (whose name I forget) recently complained of being completely unable to mock the American government, since those running the country were already effectively satirising themselves by saying and doing things more absurd and laughable than anything he could come up with.
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Papertiger New World Poetry #3 (CD-ROM for PC)
Paul Hardacre & BR Dionysius (eds)
papertiger media, Brisbane, 2003
The third CD-ROM of poetry has been released by Papertiger Media and yet again presents the work of many of Australia's finest contemporary poets. As well, the Editors have included an eclectic array of international contributors from Canada, Finland, the UK, the USA and Australasia. More interestingly it is the expanded use of the new digital format of this collection i.e. the CD-ROM.
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I'll Howl Before You Bury Me by Liam Guilar,
Interactive Press, 2003
I'll Howl Before You Bury Me is a title that suggests an emotional reprisal. The poems in this collection protest the repressing of individual vitality in favour of congenial surrender to the beige touchstones of contemporary life.
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And when you discover they lie
those siblings in the mother country, those parasites
who spend every hard-earned cent of your remittances
on Mao Tai and Fan Tan
and still beg for more –
when you see the opulent mansions of your cheating ancestors
and smell the simmering pots fill with your own cash and sweat
your never laying down the cleaver – well, you can imagine
on their dog's paws a single piece of jade will turn black with the years
you pay off the mortgages on their graves
and yours are dug in the slagheap of mines – well, you can imagine
the ripping of photos will commence
the forgetting of their names.
How a singular duty has led you to this –
your shop full of dragons in a year of crying tigers.
You say: 'This is my wealth, my friend, a secret duck sauce for two dollars
but when I think of our ancestors – ahh you can imagine
worse than the bloody government!
Museums are full of lies!'
The burning of their boats shall commence!
The people
drank each other of love
Until
The teeth lay alone
as a history of love
Wet sails fell along the spine
made the boat sleeping
rather than its
careful
or its
soft.
A curl. A bracket.
A whisper
the quiet work to soften song.
The people move and love
between the slap of waves,
Semen mixes with the sea.
Really to dip words in erotic drive
rinse them and place them on a lovely towel
In the sunlight, the pieces then, no longer actually
erotic, sometimes sensual, stripped of subject or person
But sun washed, completely human, Cavafy's wish
for outlines, a tender letter, punctuation
Dressed in qualities then, of raspberries
and pink, of wine and other spills
Apostrophes and stops, immediate plays
delicate and full, clever and long
Elegant rest, soft scarves, poorly held
and lively in the bright world.
not everything comes when its supposed to,
a feeling of open-endedness
three days threat of rain, just
sick of it when it comes
he holds his head & squints, william hurt
in until the end of the world
the metal windmill rusts the field,
& hasnt turned an age
the memory of tire swing
when hannah was three fingers old,
now three plus a day
strewn presents follow suit, yellow wrapping
in the yard
do not believe anything i tell you
abt narration
we drive a drink past mulligans,
& it rains it rains it rains
They brace the building with steel
-lucky wings snapped from the Bay Bridge-
spray down the brick warehouse walls
with an anti-earthquake (placebo) spray.
Claim we could survive a Loma Prieta replay,
but exit before the pile drivers start to pound
and the steel supports begin to hum and torque
like King Kong's goddamn tuning fork.
1. the writer arrives from melbourne
the city changes, banned
2. a public gallery, 3pm, he farts 3 times
within the hearing of a copying student, female
3. he goes to a session & he hears this woman say
“my mood picked up when sales did”
4. he quits immediately after & wonders
can't she stop saying “sort of” every 2 adjectives?
5. he randomly switches on the holy bible, red
77.1 says: “I cried out to God with my voice”
6. he shits a 2nd time, after the lit. session
& 3 pieces of crumbed fish & chips
7. he remembers last night this man telling him
when someone eats meat he opens all the windows, wide
8. he rings his wife & her voice rings:
“I thought your plane has crashed”
9. he gets an email on his mobile
a susan wood says: call me on 0428 200 188 this minute
10. he says fuck & fuck he says again
remembering this familiar face that totally ignores his greeting
11. a great opportunity of e-w communion is lost when the white man comes to sit
next to him, no words, each smoking his own root
12. as it is always lost when the writer is once again
paired with others of color
13. chips help generate gases in his bowels
as traffic generates movement in this slow city
14. to get published in australia sometimes means
you have to wait till someone dies even though that someone may be yourself
15. so i bring him with me everywhere we go
& about a very good friend of mine he says: he is a snake
16. & he imagines that to be true
& is going to tuck it in, like his bed-sheet
17. at 47, he feels he'd gone so high
that he needs to go lower than hell
18. when you don't have a heavy history, you end up with a heavy body,
he thinks as he sips bad English tea at salamanca place
19. sitting perfectly in the sun day after noon
the man, white, looks out of a painting
20. it breaks his heart to see
so many stars fallen & darkened in a 2nd hand bookshop
21. he tells the swedish woman: you can't change anything unless
you do it by physically fighting
22. that's the no-way, better than your 4th way
like the fighting maoris, not the giving up aboriginals
23. [ ]
left blank for anyone to fill in
The old language, cut into the stone block
like an epitaph, marks a bridge in the middle
of nowhere. The stream it fords is far too small
to carry a name and the stonework slung over it
looks out of place. Beneath it is a scar
excised by the trickling waters, a deep gully
in the bog, a valley's parting.
The rock commemorates the thousands who left
taking the long cut out for Glasgow, England,
the States; where both sides turned their backs
and parted; became dead to oneanother.
The valley recalls it in the spring melt-water's rush,
the sluice of juice where the sl?©an struck; the blood,
the scar and the healing
standing like a plea in the last letter home:
come meet me here at Drochead na nDeor
and walk with me again.
Ballads, Satire & Salt: A Book of Diversions by Stephen Oliver
Illustrated by Matt Ottley
Greywacke Press, 2003
The blurb on the back cover cites this as a “challenging miscellany”. What do you make of that? A mixed bag? Poetries that don't fit? Odd socks and whimsy? Well, after puzzling over the collection for a few weeks, I'd say yes to all of the above.'
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If out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry, what
do we make of our quarrels with Canberra?
– Martin Johnston
a currawong pecks at scraps
but looks at me askance
my sunglasses slip onto my nose
from off my apparently polemical
gallery of hair – the bird becomes suspicious
across the lake
parliament house peers through
the crisp monocle of the capital
the tactical colours of a yacht club sway
in fig dark water
darker than a tea-tree bay
the pupil as a basin then
& I'm sucked into the lens
sucked into the nest
sucked into the cataract of the civic
the wide eye glazes over
a thin, darkening film.
Under the bonnet we've got
a rebored Chevy big block fitted-out
with Mallory ignition, Holley twin-carbs,
Genie extractors, high-stall converters,
a port-matched Edelbrock manifold on heads
running lumpy cams, roller rockers, MT covers
and cooled through a five-row baffled
cross-flow radiator with an electric
water-pump, braided hose and twin
thermo fans (but it still runs pretty hot)
red-lining at 4800 revs sending
250 brake horse-power belting through
a Turbo 400 transmission with a B&M shifter,
down the drive train to a 1:3.36 ratio
rear diff on the arse-end spinning fat
Firestones on 14-by-8 deep-dish rims,
smokin' it up, laying down a quarter mile
in 15.9 topping out at 108 miles
an hour.
Cream premium-grain hide
interiors matched to wood detailing
compliment a high-style body finished
to concourse quality in fire-engine
red with more chrome than the sun
can shine on.
“What is it about haiku that cannot be defeated?” asked Jim Kacian, one of the founders of the World Haiku Association, in a paper delivered at the first conference of the WHA in Croatia, 2000. It's a good question, one that recurred for me throughout the three days of the second WHA conference “Haiku: Bridges Around the World”, which I attended on behalf of Cordite Poetry Review in October 2003, in Ten'ri, Japan.
The hairy huntsman, they say,
is quite harmless,
as far as spiders go.
Bullshit!
Just you try negotiating
a delicate twist
on a country curve
at 100 kph
and notice this dark motion
inching up your leg towards
your crotch
this thing
huge as a dying child's
clutching hand
moving up towards your heart.
Many a corpse has been found
with one of these bastards
squatting on its chest,
eight sapphire eyes aglow
with the upturned wheels still spinning.
…and the old girl’s macro stroppy, razor honed.
So shouldn’t I just go out, score heaps and get us both totally stoned?
Like, her ex my dad my dad, that alpha and omega pisser,
has run off to the Sunshine Coast with…Larissa?
Okay ‘lurv’. I kinda admire it, but I’d rather go dead
than think my best friend could be giving my father…head?
So, when I get to see him and he’s all earstud ‘n’ lovebite
(hoho, whose been helping you codependent through the night?)
and familial interaction seems the least of his chores:
‘Err how’s y’mother, Princess?’ Jeez Pop, jeez Pop, how’s yours?
The embarrassment! He’s fifty one, she’s twenty four,
so wouldn’t you move further than Maroochydore?
There’s better, it’s worse but, the Get this! fun begins.
They run this motel, see? And she’s expecting, she’s expecting…twins?
pounding through rough-cut wild
there are the white-line reminders
each tree poled and caged in a crib of stone
every copper link strung tight between connections
and back to what?
every signpost and fence that splits
the difference of here and there,
mine and none,
now and then,
each tin-can hint of ravenous appetite
and all the littered scraps
of our consumption's fast-lane flight
flung
into what silence remains.
phrases like novels in verse redeeming feature melbourne/ as
bombala only show in town radio mongrels lord unwordy
Coloured;: blocks & a line depict your, life while
you a beast fade an explanation
a. Mouthful of symbolic a teacher
though rough & innocentish know recurrence &;
b o awareness
circles like A flaming hoop “getting on fine
wait for the breakup & underwater subsequence wade? Was a friend here sliding
doors resembling dreaming of toni? Colette knocking
the church walls down to give god – space
To give god a big orange ta & an
earbashing elderly; german cineastes feast On juice & water weak wristed &) with surreal senses of
direction everythings everything if its canned why do
you/ refuse Love lying on your bed
at teatime gone (in the past
pushing my beautiful blonde Face at the! fence sending me away in the rain sad crazy? & trembling
if One memory could
get out (of the car leaving
pauls life behind they never Had
any affection) worse they played to my worst motives; the erosion of any sinful feeling like my
First egg it: exploded creating
a scandal thats why the shocking violence
& suicide Attempts &! car theft are so
many people dying at petrol stations obstructions”
In their windpipes if the answers yes then
  why make movies (about it because Of public demand the need to pick a box the need to.
Smear the
glass between their tears & the view From their, hovels lonely in their familiar asylums
superman
per
ubermensch
pour introduire le ver dans la fruit
fast as gods driver
the only naked objects needed
bigeye killers
unlike snakepeople
how
shotgun come on its
headed for
youngish buffed having death
death
bigeye killers
cry blood
shotgun come on its
youngish buffed having death
maybe i should swallow
should
unlike snakepeople
maybe i should swallow
may
it crazy is it
between the ears
the bureaucratic balsa
eau
___ burocracia
so what
so
how
how
water
do i regret the fight
fare io rincrescimento
heavy forms of soccer
locked
the snake lost a tooth
heavy forms of soccer
so what
contains quotes from:
white wedding – billy idol;
jean genet as quoted in genet – edmund white;
should i do it – pointer sisters;
bug a boo – destinys child
Had a dream last night –
Mother dragging me by the hair
to a construction site,
Had to build an aircraft hangar
to house a single dollar coin,
My uncle shot me through the head
with a nail gun
when I tried to write on the lunchbreak.
Via Tiburtina, Rome
3 am. In the apartment above
Our Medea sound-alike chainsaws sleep
And silence. A voice to die from!
Her man somewhere at its rim,
Pitching in his centesimo's worth,
Knocking nocturnes to smithereens.
Courtesy of Helios Airways,
O for a chariot to magic them
Away. Only in this play a scene's
Got stuck, its author as if long since
Vanished with a headache: We listen,
Forced albeit walled-off audience
While the darkness throngs with wrongs
In direst stereo; lacking a theologian,
The agon goes on and on…
this yard is a disgrace weeds propelled by their own inner trajectories want to grab more sky snails have left silver highways lemons fall and squash like faces against the driveway everything green moves to fill cracks in the cement are an open invitation the pepper tree has thrown out its branches like a diva embracing applause the woman in her almost black suit her linen face creased against the anarchy this yard is a disgrace she says poison she says whippersnipper she says secateurs she says she doesn’t understand five years the garden and I have grown green and surly together she doesn’t understand my father in a faded deckchair on a blonde and blue day lost in the shadows of leaves as long as nothing’s dead I say as long as nothing’s dead her mouth is a red tremor she can tell
I mean it.
