Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming
Pitt Street Poetry, 2015

The Offhand Angel, by Jan Owen
Eyewear Publishing, 2015

Every so often a reader will come across a book that seems custom-crafted for – or even, disconcertingly, out of – their own matter and marrow. For me Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming ticks boxes at a machine gun rate, even in its insouciantly avuncular foreword. There, Cumming gives an account of buying The Rebel Angels by William Robertson Davies (dense, curious, intricate), and then at Treadwells (a bookshop for occult fanciers) picks up a copy of Oral Folk Tales of Wessex, published in 1973 (‘a year I like – it’s got a nine, a seven, a three and a one in it, all powerful numbers’).

Cumming was only ten in 1973, but has a great affinity with the spirit of those murky, post-60s times, especially in England, with centuries of vaguely occult folk detritus to fall back on and form into a kind of psychic ointment including alternative music, politics and attitude. The fact that he has also made a documentary about Hawkwind for the BBC comes as no surprise. As it happens, I grew up in England, slightly ahead of Cumming. I was 16 in 1973, and I saw Hawkwind play at the Windsor Free Festival. I was, and am still, covered in a fine dust of the same detritus. Even after thirty years in Melbourne I find that this book drifted across me like a sea fog, obliterating both time and, possibly, critical distance.

Cumming is no pasticheur, though. He has a very particular way of weaving political and personal feelings and observations, tying them to the threads that run beneath the surface of English history and society. The threads are like ley lines: hallowed by time, and powerful-sounding, but faint. It takes an effort of will to reassert them, and this effort, or the energy it requires, is clear throughout this collection, just as it is in Iain Sinclair’s subterranean excursions through East London (Lights Out For The Territory and Downriver) or, Canadian style, in any of Davies’ novels.

Cumming’s poetics is certainly cinematic, and he has made several of his poems into short films. One of these, ‘Flowers’, nods to the eighteenth century and with picaresque murkiness swings by the Peter Ackroyd milieu and the scholarship of Humphrey Jennings; but it is not always easy to tell whether this is following a tradition or just slotting into a well-worn, comfortable, English groove. The text of Cumming’s poems, especially ‘Office Building at Night’, is far more visual and cinematic than the filmed iterations, which is reassuring and just. For example:

The city at night from a 
hardwood desk with locked drawers
and a phone extension, beige.
There is a face at the window
but no one’s in the room,
fire stairs twist from basement to boardroom,
every floor dar and vacant
caked in dust rising in astonishment
when anyone enters but who does?

Many poems push through on one breath from beginning to end, their forward motion pulling in every conceit available that might resonate. ‘Skins’, for example, exhales the feel of a pub in Essex full of English patriots:

walking like men in the moon, 
turning from the bar in milky white 
skins like sagging sou’westers, 
a white-haired Saxon in sandals 
on the steps of the Garden Tiger 
fighting air in and out of his lungs 
as if it was an enemy invasion, 
the rule of foreign elements 
sliding down from his head 
to the feet, where they planted him 
with a pouch of rolling tobacco, 
the smell of smoke and the sound 
of drums misting with the morning lager

Elsewhere Cumming adjusts the rhythm, as in ‘The Changes’: a one sentence stanza, then a second with three, and a tiny run on at its end, then slightly more of one, and then a long run to the end, broken only once, and by a rhyme. His rhymes are completely mercurial, subtle rimshots that accent and kick along, and his feel for rhythm clear in ‘Sound of a room’:

The best fade outs were the Stones, 
heads down and meet you at the end  
when fade outs mattered, splattered, 
the tongue in its groove and what 
it felt like wasn’t an all-out congress 
and chemical analysis on a private jet 
but nights in the studio, the gaps 
between days and the sound of a room, Keith’s guitar keening

It is an entirely artificial coincidence that Cumming’s book is published here by Pitt Street Poetry, just as Jan Owen is published in the UK for the first time, with this ‘new and selected’ survey from Eyewear Press; but it will serve. Cumming’s ‘travel’ poems are as experiential and as familiar as his domestic ones, possessing (or assuming) a relaxed kinship with each place – Serbia, Morocco, Sudan – that allows him to ruminate rather than stare. Australian poets tend to be less relaxed abroad: often they seem to stare fixedly, looking for meaning. Jan Owen does this too, but her gaze passes right through its ostensible object and into a reverie—taking in the matter at hand, tangentially. One of her earliest poems, ‘First Love’, encompasses all this: a schoolgirl, who I took to be the young Jan, falls in love with ‘The Man with Grey Eyes’ in the Titian painting: ‘hardly ideal – / he was four hundred and forty, / I was fourteen’; and early on learns the blessings and limitations of art because, ‘Of course / my fingers, sticky with toffee and bliss, / failed to entice him from his century; / his cool grey stare / fastened me firmly in mine.’

This poem resonates through her oeuvre, partly because, from this point in, cool and appraising eyes feature so much more than sticky fingers. As well, ‘First Love’ begins an interplay between art, the seeing of it, and the seeing of life that she has continued to this day, so that in her work there’s often but the faintest of boundaries between these dimensions. The poem ends, ‘Ten years later, I married: / a European with cool grey eyes, / a moustache, / pigskin gloves.’ It is almost as if she married Europe, as a kind of civil companion, and tellingly there is on the opposite page to ‘First Love’ a poem (‘Kismarton’) in which she and the grey eyes almost go home, staring across the border from Austria into an unreachable Hungary. Even more tellingly, the first line of that poem is: ‘The alliance was uneasy even then’.

There are a number of uneasy alliances in Owen’s book: among them, home and the world, humanity and nature, art and life, youth and experience, and most poignantly, love and release. In one of her most awarded poems, ‘Boy with a telescope’, her son is stargazing, and as she leaves him to it:

I touch his arm and go, 
but look back from the door: 
he is swivelling to another constellation, 
checking the finder, muttering to himself. 
And may he always stand so – 
a little to one side of what he loves, 
earn a clear view 
through fine adjustments, steady care. 
I wish him distance and desire, 
quick hands, keen eyes – 
may his mind reach, tactile as fingertips, 
to the sharp braille of the skies.

That Owen’s regard is expressed in a tone and with a timbre very much like that of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Advice to the actress C.N.’ on how to wash in the morning, and is yet completely un-didactic and immensely tender, says all we need to know about her as a poet. When she looks back at her own childhood there isn’t such a regard: it is fustian and perhaps over-remembered, and with odd hints of menace, as when, in ‘History Lessons’, Stalin dies, in 1953, on the day – almost at the moment – that she starts her first period. She writes: ‘Someone was dead, / and we were allowed to be glad. / all day some distant darkness spilled through me.’