reviews | Kerry Leves

LOOKING OUT AT THE LIGHTS: NEW POETRY

• Laurie Duggan: The Passenger (UQP, ISBN 070223555, $23.95)

The Passenger is an oblique travelogue, a journey through landscapes that are saturated with signification: “Nearly everywhere now/ is less than ‘24 hours from Tulsa’,/ yet for Gene Pitney it was close enough/ for infidelity to be unforgivable.” The Passenger’s daybook construction – it’s a succession of fragmentary, often disconnected moments, e.g. “A day so perfect,/ wake of a ferry on the mud-coloured river” – intercepts and deflects the totalising potentialities of any language system. The book’s ‘Blue Hills’ poems are its best joke: the rubric teases a reader’s nostalgia for densely-packed human-interest narrative, yet the actual poems are bare, spare, haiku-like invocations of quotidian moments. Whether these are judged perfectly ordinary or tensely ontological may depend on the kind of cultural baggage a reader brings to the text. The Passenger operates in a cooled-out jazz style, values the aesthetics of the everyday (“A crane hovers,/ cement blocks as counterweight”) and improvises on acedie with occasional wit: “just two minutes after/ Les Murray became a republic/ somebody cancelled my visa”. The title might be considered a homage to the late, great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, who invented a cinematic equivalent of this anomic, plangent, neo-romantic drifting in his 1960 classic, L’Avventura.

• Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith (eds): Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Pandanus, ISBN 1740762045, $29.95)

With fine curatorial acumen Vivian Smith and the late Noel Rowe assembled this bulky historical anthology of Australian poets’ responses to that near-mythic continent Asia. Their choices create a sense of direction, from the out-and-out racism of Brunton Stephens’ (1835–1902) ‘Chinee Cook’ poems to the knowing cosmopolitanism of Michael Brennan’s ‘Godzilla High’ in which a hung-over twenty-first century traveller asks, “Would Tokyo enter me as a consciousness, attracted like a fridge/ to a magnet?” Brennan’s playfulness reflects the editors’ sophisticated approach. The works seem to have been selected through listening, perhaps for vocal intonations that imply a breaking or opening of the line to exotic cadences or nuances – the voice of the Other – plus an attentiveness to visual images that evoke responses to the apparent super-subtleties of traditional Chinese and Japanese painting. Haiku and haiku-like poems display many poets’ willingness to engage with thinking styles embodied in forms developed on non-Australian and non-European soil. Everyone from John Shaw Neilson to J.S. Harry seems to have tried this – in their cases, exquisitely. Windchimes is about representation, and styles of representation. Some readers may experience it as a polyphonic extended mood-piece, transmuting the ‘Asia’ of its subtitle into the ‘always beyond’ of Michael Taussig, a fetishised space where longing, enchantment and misrecognition set the terms of an endlessly elusive moment. But the relentless aestheticism could have pumped a bit more iron. Ouyang Yu mocks both Anglo-Aussie complacency and his own transcultural hypersensitivity, but surely the barbaric elegance of the Vietnamese-Australian Xuan Duong’s poems about refugees (in flight, in camps, in transit, in peril, in quick or attenuated dying) deserved a place, if only to heighten the reminder that ‘Asia’, as a state of mind, encompasses the latter’s harshest tortures along with impulses to dream, to create, to ambiguate, to commodify. On the same demurring note: Randolph Stow’s astonishing ‘Thailand Railway’, a commemoration of a Second World War atrocity that’s also Australian poetry’s uniquely bloodthirsty secular requiem – lustful, murderous, tender and cognitively illuminating – has likewise been omitted, perhaps for reasons of space, but lamentably nonetheless.

• Barry Hill: The War Sonnets (Picaro, ISBN 9781920957254, $5)

Barry Hill’s War Sonnets declare war on post-Cold-War business-is-business impersonal verbiage (“another ceasefire”, “the gateposts of history”) through silences created around bodily things, e.g. “the floppy things/ that play, like kittens, at the end of arms/ that still belong.” The hospital ward, the TV screen, the “National Capital” and the “north wind” rustling “mahogany gums” outside an insomniac’s window are the mise en scène. The contrasts between loved bodies and bodies ranked by others – by war itself – as unlovable, are thematic. These sonnets rely on the not-said, perhaps the unsayable, as their baseline, quoting Rumi’s “The man of God comes riding from nothingness” against “that radio news of one more naked/ paraded prisoner, hooded and unnamed, a mud man/ a shit man his back caked in excrement”. The book renders obscenity – the obscenity, for instance, of cluster-bomb-backed bullying, “mocking nothingness, exporting love” – with a resonant calmness of tone.

• Alison Croggon: Ash (Cusp, no ISBN, $10)

At a ‘Poets Against the War’ reading for this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Alison Croggon performed some “found poems” from the CIA’s instruction book for professional interrogators, and Barry Hill accurately described this as a raid on obscene language. Croggon also read from Ash, and allowed the sedulous lyricism of the Ash poems to mediate an antiwar statement. These poems combine an on-the-page visual elegance (the forms alone seem to insist on art as a balancing act) with a formidable command of pitch and tone. From ‘Of Prayer’: “words that want to summon a common awe/ like the masked actor burning under lights/ whose most artful gesture is burdened with innocence…” The visual clarities and indicative tensions may make some readers think of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, revised to express a twenty-first century reserve about the drift of cultures towards “bombs and clocks and telephones” – and towards the weightless indifferentiation this trope implies. There are also entranced echoes of Spenser – incantatory rhythms, dreamlike imagery – that seem to set the recognisable late-modern sentiments under glass. “I cannot imagine art into myself:/ it means nothing./ This dust which drifts, fine, illuminated/ by the strange sun I think I am, it reflects/ image after image …” (from ‘Mystery of Surfaces’).

• Paul Hardacre: Love in the Place of Rats (Transit Lounge, ISBN 9780975022849, $22)
  

Rhapsodists may have been rare and exceptional among poets always, but in these times they could seem to warrant an endangered species listing. As extravagant and emotional utterance, as extended, expansive, dissonant word-music, this book of love poems seems written – with deliberation – as an always-to-be-assembled mimetic jigsaw of a world thick with commodifications and representations; taglines and pre-fabricated fantasies; slogans and ‘cheap music’; detritus and multifarious hungers. Yet the poems make space for delicacy: “those rice-paper fingers of spring street like sorcery/ postcards of god made of brick & the new path she walks” (from ‘birth of the urban Aghora’). They also pay tribute to the senses: “come back soaked & she wondering how to escape this/ mess this moonchild born of Kali who makes it on/ Indian newspaper wrapped in brown string with Krsna &/ his reliable mount in brass in her hand &/ her fingers milk coffee beautiful find me hard/ for explosive bush with this cock of a stranger …” (from ‘a grey doomsday in August’). Line by line this poetry, with its distressed surfaces that recede continually into a lyricism of headlong and exalted love, reads with a freshness that makes the conception – the lover/ muse metamorphoses into Kali (Hindu goddess of time) – just about credible.

• Judy Johnson: Jack (Pandanus, ISBN 9781740762052, $19.95)

Mother-of-pearl, harvested by heavily suited and helmeted divers working from small ships called luggers, was a primary product of Australian waters from about 1860 to 1960. Set in Torres Strait in 1938, Jack re-imagines the life of the pearl-divers. It’s a good read – unassuming and suspenseful. Told entirely from the point of view of Captain Jack Falconer, the novella-length poem (broken into short, linked, wittily-titled episodes) also allows a reader to meet and make some sense of the feelings, thoughts and motives of his crew – two Japanese, a Malay, a Chinese, three young Torres Strait Islanders. The unobtrusively clever writing foregrounds power struggles – cross-cultural, economic, social, sexual – aboard the Matilda. “Georgie and Dickie are rolling across the deck/ stuck together like mating slugs./ Each one’s trying/ to get a hand loose/ and punch the other./ I put the boot in, not particular whose back/ I’m connecting with./ ‘I’m sick of you two ratbags./ What is it this time?’” Jack’s tensely ambivalent egoism is portrayed laconically; the book makes a tangy contribution to the tradition of male-protagonists-on-journeys-to-madness that seems a specialty of Anglo-Aussie women writers (e.g. Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead). Every bit of one-upmanship, every ploy and putdown perpetrated by Jack seems to index his increasing isolation. The supporting characters and the mise en scène impress so vividly that Jack’s loss of intimacy with this living world accumulates a cognitive, even a moral impact. I found the triangular back-story (Jack’s a fugitive from justice) a bit shopworn, but was more than rewarded by the voyage itself – by the lustrous hyper-reality of textures and voices; the glaring seas and the cumbersome diving-gear; the masculine strutting, bonding and fighting; the labour and furtive daydreaming on a creaking deck in sweltering tropical heat.

• Bryony Cosgrove (ed.): Portrait of a Friendship: The Letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright 1950–2000 (Miegunyah, ISBN 9780522 85355, $60)
  

When Judith Wright died in 2000, Barbara Blackman contacted Bryony Cosgrove with a tentative inquiry about the historical value of the correspondence between herself and the poet. Cosgrove worked with Blackman and Wright’s daughter Meredith McKinney for seven years, annotating and sorting the letters. The resulting book has multiple time-capsule effects. In the email era of get-on-with-the-job functional language – language as techne – Portrait of a Friendship is opinionated, emotionally colourful, richly detailed, fabulously and fastidiously digressive. It’s a showcase of letter-writing as performative act and art. The two-way communications give Portrait an edge on monologic ‘Letters of …’ collections. While – for instance – Patrick White’s collected Letters equally entertain and tantalise the reader who’s continually left wondering about the recipients’ responses, here the counterpoint grows a context. Wright, whose poetry can at times sound rather heavily self-conscious, reveals herself – e.g. in a letter of 6 December 1968 – informally, with breezy asperity: “I entirely agree about people never saying anything real about what one writes. It’s as though a curious wall of unknowing intervenes; it’s all right to talk about the Technique and the Subject and the Development and the Form but never apparently does anyone observe the Communication. I think it makes them feel they’re being got at or something.” Ouch. Blackman handles a range of topics with equal verve.

• J.S. Harry: Not Finding Wittgenstein (Giramondo, ISBN 9781920882204, $24.95)
  

“Language itself belongs among the most mysterious questions for human reflection,” wrote the twentieth-century German philosopher H.G. Gadamer. A reader might do worse than keep Gadamer’s statement in mind while navigating J.S. Harry’s epic anti-epic, a “poem of force” that propels itself along at the pace of a good thriller yet also insists on breathing the quieter air of the lyric. On a dark seashore the philosopher Bertrand Russell “looks out at the lights:/ Each one is shut in on itself    like a human being,/ he notes. None of the light circles touch one another./ At the edges the light    gets gradually darker –;/ it’s not clear    where light begins and darkness stops./ Wittgenstein    will write about this” (from ‘Circles’). Also on-scope: art (cubism, via a vignette of Picasso at lunch: “Mathematical formulae/ boil, out of his eyeballs, & float – / cartoonlike – across/ the restaurant’s tables”); democracy and bastardisations thereof, cults, ancestor worship, poets and poetry, totalitarianism, war, sex and, above all, philosophy. It’s to the latter that Not Finding Wittgenstein’s compass needle continually swings. “Reality happens,” to quote Gadamer again, “not behind the back of language, but in language.” A serious consideration, yet on the surface Harry’s treatment of it could appear frivolous and often reads as riotous – should such material come across as quite this funny? The rabbit Peter Henry Lepus – “British … of Creole origins” – gathering material for a projected ‘Rabbit History of Philosophers’ (which already implies some revision of philosophy’s traditionary telos), dialogues with a large and varied cast in “Australia”, “Antarctica”, “Japan”, and in “Iraq 2003”. The quotation marks, like tweezers, grip a question. Are “the limits of my language … the limits of my world”, as Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Harry doesn’t insist on a straight answer, but probes and interrogates from divergent, varied entry points. Near-farcical misrecognitions occur as non-human characters negotiate human language (the “junior Huntsman spider” Clifa Webb performs comic miracles of literal mindedness), yet the tonal modulations permit writings of morgue and dismembered baby, or the torture marks on a corpse, with an entirely apposite level-headed precision.

Kerry Leves is a New South Wales poet.

© Kerry Leves

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.77–79.

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