Although it’s by the same publisher, and surely displays the same non-fiction elements as Apollo Bay, Vehicular Man by Mitchell Welch is a very different book. It does engage in some autobiography, but Welch is more interested in experimenting with the genre of non-fiction poetry than telling his own story.
In ‘Clifftop Bluff,’ Welch employs a range of scientific terminology alongside biblical references to describe a scene at the beach (9). Bald-headed men teaching their children to dry off after swimming are “basalt domes” whose “mock turtle offspring” are learning to “desiccate” (9). But, the children don’t seem to get it: “vesicles contract new work / but falter on demand” (9). I had to look up ‘vesicles,’ and from what I can tell, a vesicle is a small container in a cell, a biological cell, not a carceral one. The children aren’t absorbing the knowledge into their being – they aren’t learning. Fishermen pulling fish from the surf are “bull-nosed Noahs snorting / the lunatic wash of a stillborn century’s moon” (9). I assume these fishers are so prolific and frantic in their action that one could assume they are trying to get two of each fish. Applying this kind of language to such a mundane scene seems to point to the poet’s propensity, even need, to intellectualise things. It may also point to a kind of detachment, like that of a young child who, unlike others, was unable to enjoy the beach. However, I think the poem is successful in communicating that detachment, and maybe even mocking its own intellectualism.
‘Venus of Eastlink’ begins with an inscription from World Highways Magazine that reads “Australia’s biggest road project / to date is a work of art” (16). I like this poem a lot. It asks after the beauty of the artificial and the practical, the mundane utility of our beautiful roads. We love road projects, don’t we folks? SUVs are novated in bright finance, “gunning to outrun its depreciation plan” (16). A partial construction, a work in progress is
an effigy upraising pre-stressed concrete stumps, steel rebar tendons gesturing at forelimbs frozen in the fog of awe as if to say: Stop! (16)
The poem then ends with the line “You must not stop while travelling on the Eastlink!” (16). Welch is trying to appreciate the beauty of the work, trying as hard as he can – the voice of the industry called it a work of art! But it cannot be admired, only driven on. This is kind of an inverse thesis to ‘Clifftop Bluff.’ There the natural was intellectualised, here the artificial is naturalised. The tensions between beauty and utility are palpable.
The poem ‘Scowl’ is an homage to that famous poet’s seminal work ‘Howl’ (52). I won’t go too far into its contents other than asking readers: What if you wrote ‘Howl’ but about millennials? It begins with “I saw the most lit baes of Millennium 3 emboldened by inexperience” (52). You can probably guess how the rest of it reads. ‘Howl’ is a good poem and I get the urge to imitate its rabid metre and lament for a generation whose trust was broken. But surely this urge is dated. I would think a poet with as much literary sensibility as Welch would have seen the vulgarity in writing such a poem (have a read of ‘Paterson’s Curse’ on page 36 instead for evidence of Welch’s literary chops). Allen Ginsberg wrote ‘Howl’ in this metre, with his words, in a lament that so suited the time and stood in opposition to the myth-building and betrayal he saw beginning to take shape. Our generation (or mine and the poet’s, read it and fill in the blanks for a Generation Z version) is different to the one that Archbishop Allen wrote about. If we were truly skilled, we would find a new form, a rabid metre of our own to express the discontent that’s been thrust on us. Maybe my aversion to its lack of invention has blinded me to the poem’s worth, but I don’t think that’s the case.
You can skip forward a few pages to find ‘Skull of the Cyclops’ (60). I began this review discussing the blurred lines between fiction and non-fiction, where the two are sometimes interchangeable on a long enough timescale. If you’ve ever looked at the skull of an elephant (or mammoth), you might think it had one large eye right in the centre. If you did, you’d agree with the ancient Greeks who based their myths of the cyclops on such a skull. I can’t imagine a more apt explanation of the tension between fiction and non-fiction. First the skull was found – a true, tangible object that had to be explained. It sparked around itself that most imaginative and creative of forms, myth. But it was not only fiction: the Greeks’ best attempt at science posited that a huge, one-eyed creature left this skull. Then science progressed and we slaughtered and skinned enough elephants to see that this was not some mythical creature, just a larger form of the elephants we’d so brutally murdered. But only through this revelation could the cyclops be properly labelled as myth. From non-fiction to fiction, back and forth between these blurry boundaries, what a journey this poem traces.
Welch approaches the brutal tale of the cyclops’s skull in a, accordingly, poetic manner. The Greeks “met it at the cracked lip of a theoretical cupola / as it acted out its ending in the spotlight of our time” (60). The skull of the mammoth has its final show, rising from the dirt to be reborn as myth. The skull “peeled open our empty homes to find our bones / bent in the marks of questions we were loath to ask” (60). The utility of myth is clear here: it gives our lives meaning. The poem finishes in a haunting quartet:
When we slept we stepped off stones into the mire, tied our feet and bound our wrists with copper wire. When we woke we spoke in tongues and said nothing to give away our secrets to those whose time had come. (60)
I think he’s referring to one of the various corpses mummified in European peat, some found with bound limbs and signs of struggle, the mysteries of their deaths now impenetrable. He asks us to empathise with the mammoth because we, too, could one day become some kind of cyclops to whatever species inherits the mantle of top predator on the planet. And what would they know about us other than the concrete, tangible objects they find? They’ll have to fill in the gaps, create their own myths. Non-fiction and fiction will likely overlap once more if the earth’s new overlords invent their own science.
It’s hard to do either of these books justice. Fox’s is more beautiful and meaningful and Welch’s is more complex and articulate than I can communicate within a reasonable word limit. Welch might be the better poet. His dictionary-craving words and strict command of rhythm and metre seem destined to win prizes. But I think most readers will appreciate the personal and sincere journey Fox takes them on in Apollo Bay.
