review | Kerry Leves
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Kerry Leves
They tramp there in their legions on the mornings dark and cold, The Hungry Mile – Hickson Road, The Rocks, Sydney – got its name between the First and the Second World Wars. Its mile of wharves held the hope of casual, low-paid work for maritime labourers, who were selected for their physical strength and political docility: this was known as ‘the Bull System’. Ernest Antony wrote the poem in 1930 and it was recited, quoted and circulated by word-of-mouth, quickly attaining the status of a folk ballad, as Merv Lilley acknowledged in his fictionalised autobiography The Channels (2001). All of Ernest Antony’s 1930 collection is reproduced here: his book shows poetry as a living force, strong like the ‘liquid dynamite’ sampled by Antony ‘in Queensland scrubs’, but offering also a head-clearing, melodic experience for a reader. Rowan Cahill’s introduction recreates the times and the poet’s itinerant life. The name of the Hungry Mile will be preserved even as the locality it refers to is dedicated to harbourside redevelopment – a postmodern detail that may register somewhere between cold comfort and bitter irony.
This large anthology has a lot going for it: sumptuous visual design; wide pages that make the most of a dizzying variety of poetic shapes and sizes; high-calibre connoisseurship in the editing. The several introductions (one by Pang, one by Kinsella, preceded by a joint effort) emphasise dialogue between ‘the two territories’ as an aim. The Singaporean poets, writing in English, along with non-Anglo Australians such as Ali Alizadeh, Yahia al-Samawy (translated by Eva Sallis), Javant Biarujia, Merlinda Bobis, Lionel Fogarty, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Sudesh Mishra, Ouyang Yu and π.o. generate a lively hybridity in the language. Happily, the first poem in the book is Iranian-born Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Listening to Michael Jackson in Tehran’, a cross-cultural tour de force which puts sociality – as opposed to, say, clashing fundamentalisms – front-row-centre. There’s some very rewarding poetry here – by Alison Croggon, Jennifer Maiden, David McCooey and Felix Cheong, for instance, plus a sampling of lucidly subtle work by Eddie Tay – with textures and tensions of urban postmodernity, non-Western-style. The anthology benefits from a generous selection from the great Edwin Thumboo, from ‘May 1954′ – ‘Depart white man./ Your minions riot among/ Our young in Penang Road/ Their officers, un-Brittanic,/ Full of service, look/ Angry and short of breath’ – to ‘Tuscan Sun Festival’, written half a century later, which celebrates poetry and all art as human, ‘replenishing little miracles in hill and valley’. The poetic vitality and variety encompassed by this book make it awesome, if not quite a miracle.
This celebration of Melbourne footy life scores through simple language which lets emotion speak while sensory experience is evoked: ‘The turnstile clicks, and I’m in,/ Racing up the stairs for a god’s-eye view./ Life’s promise is redeemed in full/ Stamped by the opening bounce’ (‘Opening Bounce’). The experiential range is wide. Tom Petsinis’ partly-autobiographical poems create the excitement of communal feeling, of belonging to a code, a club, a community – the ups and the downs. ‘The siren kills the ball on the outer wing,/ Stunning players dead in their boots./ The crowd, swallowing the bitterness of soul,/ Lacks an emotion for the score’ (‘77 Grand Final’). The poems are also very good at stirring up a sense of the things that work against feeling part of it all – time and change, for instance: ‘Now, forty years on, and aging fast,/ What will I show grandchildren to come?/ A finger fractured in a game?/ A kneecap crossed by operations?/…/Each generation starts from 0/ In finding a language for its pain.’ Petsinis, born in 1953 in Macedonia, emigrated with his family as a child; his poetic shuttling between experiential fields – from an outsider’s to an insider’s position, and back again – is done with considerable poignancy.
Reading this Notebook is like body-surfing in a choppy sea – exhilarating rides to shore interspersed with stupefying dumpers. Not to say that this contrastive effect is necessarily undesirable, nor, perhaps, in the sociopolitical context intimated by Cronin’s poems, undesired. Surrealism seems freshly-coined by ‘The Swimming Pool is Broken’: ‘The swimming pool is broken./ They can’t make it work./ One efficient warrior screams at it from the side./ No result./ The housewife tries ravishing in it./ Nothing./ The gondolier comes up with his little commuter boat./ The mermaid puts on her glove./ Three smelly clouds offer some suggestions./ It’s all hot, narcotic, lush and uncertain.’ This poem gets funnier. By contrast the surrealist gestures of ‘Blue Lines’ read as facile decals applied to brain-candy sentiments. MTC’s oeuvre rolls along. Her recent collection More or Less than I > 100 decanted the visions of a sociable mystic (if that seems a contradiction in terms, it’s deliberate) and was controlled by an audacious formal experiment. Everything’s changed again here. Poems (more appositely, fables in the form of lyric poems) as fresh and tangy as ‘The Pick-Up’, ‘One Feather, One Stone’, ‘The Village of Fish’ (‘His name was Adolino/ and his naked sweet bone/ is caught in the utility neck of realism’) and ‘The Latest Neuroses’ (‘There could be a truck loaded up with these responsible eyes’) can seem diminished by a provenance that includes non-starters like ‘The Sign of Being Dead’. The voice in all her poetry (seventeen books so far) is never unitary; vocal variety emerges as a metaphor for multiple realities and/ or selves. Like Whitman, this poet ‘contain[s] multitudes’ and they say their say, one way or another, regardless of the wishes of the imagined ego/ persona/ reader for a smooth face, a simulacrum of command. ‘Caught in the melee we look for signals/ Even something as untranslatable as a twinkle in the eye/ has us telling each other/ what it all means’ (‘Broken Signs & Numbers’).
Alan Watts once wrote that all mystical texts can be read as sets of instructions. James Charlton’s poems have this procedural quality – ‘Best spiritual practice is to drop the word Best,/ the word Spiritual, the word Practice’ (‘Best Spiritual Practice’) – but the longer ones shape up as engaging journeys. Their travel scenes are vivid with sensory detail, whether through ‘Mangrove Swamp’ – ‘Stroked by parental shadows,/ young plants snorkel in brine./ Silt becomes mud/ becomes land’ or through following the flight of ‘Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos’: ‘Random as rags whooshed off a truck,/ they indolently amble on the air.’ In a genre that is singularly prone to sentimental cliché and vague abstraction, Charlton’s poetry favours concrete imagery, exact description, subtle rhythm and a sense of history, the latter informed by research and a flair for the telling detail. In ‘Transgressive Saints’, a thirteenth-century Belgian nun, heretically desiring ‘to flow with sap/ of fidelity to all’, does farm work to lower the volume as her ‘mind’s clacking mill/ grinds and grinds’. Meanwhile ‘My ducks nod and waddle in my wake,/ nuzzle fallow ground./ Here, see us, they say./ Look, you earnest sister‘ The nun’s counterpart is Simone Weil – the brilliant social philosopher who by her own insistence was an assembly line worker for Renault, then a labourer in a vineyard. Charlton quotes her credo – ‘only to refuse belief/ in gods that are not God‘ – placing this as ‘the world’s real labour’ in the final line. It is moving and even persuasive. The idea of non-duality is staked on an implicit or tacit (or ‘molecular’ as Charlton suggests in one poem) identity between ‘you’ and ‘me’, between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and is hard to express outside the lexis and syntax of spirituality, whether Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic. James Charlton finds a non-denominational language for it that shows ‘the holy and the ordinary to be equal’ (‘New Norcia Boys’). It is often bold: ‘where our skin stops/ our bodies do not stop’. It is also effective, assisting to – in the words of Hindu mystic Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) – ‘give the mind an inward turn’. The end of the journey – call it being, silence, stillness – makes Charlton’s vivid travelling worth the read.
Dragan Dragojlovic, who served as Serbian ambassador to Australia, wrote this book about the civil war and acts of genocide that ravaged Yugoslavia. He uses words to create silences. ‘Night thins out./ Day paces slowly/ across the valleys/ where our death/ stopped for the evening./ We sprawl in low-lying trenches./ Instead of birds,/ invisible shots screech,/ and an unfamiliar dead man,/ fearlessly,/ walks across the fields’ (‘An Unfamiliar Dead Man’). Short and sparely-written, these poems are blunt about life as it is experienced in a context of ongoing, mindless death. Paradoxically they evoke a spirit that has discarded creeds and cant, that dwells in the lines with the kind of dignity that used to be perceived in Gothic cathedrals, in requiem masses. ‘Explosions of mortar shells/ are an infernal necklace/ around the neck of night./ Tender, as mother’s grace,/ is the occasional silence/ observing its reflection/ in the fires/ that burn quietly in the distance./ In the void we call/ heaven/ someone plays/ a posthumous flute’ (‘Posthumous Flute’).
When Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote ‘Je est un autre‘ (literally ‘I is another’), was he anticipating the digital age, where, as some music theorists argue, ‘I’ is but a permutation in the flow of information? Or was Rimbaud prefiguring Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian insight: ‘the obstacle to full self-identity is the very condition of selfhood’? Michael Farrell’s poetry makes some questioning of ‘selfhood’ inevitable because it reworks lyric – always the most subjective poetic form – into an expression of the digitised, mediated, post-industrial world, the contemporary world with its 0-1 double-binds: ‘the way letting go grows in power/ & believes it has its own feelings/ of nakedness of broken wood’ (‘a ray of winter’). Anti-epic, the lyricism is permutational, sample-taking, even dubby. Poems homaging writers such as the Brontes and Gertrude Stein include montages of definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, prepositions (e.g. ‘‘and’, ‘of, ‘the’, ‘the” from ‘?charlotte bronte”) arraying them as trade tools while also letting them create percussive sound-values; other poems repeat phrases, thus leveraging their particular tones. The poetry is physically enjoyable, playful, teasing and emotionally tonic. The soi-disant ‘extreme’ culture of our times is reread against routine assignments of gender and sexuality (‘the man/ agement’). Community is sued for but also problematised: ‘we read & we/ criticise & hide in/ our shadows drawn out by/ lamps & puppeteer skill’ (‘quiet for’). Other writers are both ancestors and community to Farrell’s Janus-faced lyric poet: ‘what she saw hurt her/ made her work harder/ they didn’t like her/ her cottage either/ animals hopped down/ to the beach that year/ bikes circled their waists/ that was the point of/ calm hilarity/ sticking to your guns’ (‘;gertrude stein:’). Farrell breaks up words to turn them into new sensory experiences; he steps a poem across a two-page spread, forcing the reader’s eye/mind to dance. His language asserts its materiality – the physical experience is not confined to mouth or ear. Sampling from multiple verbal arts and languages, Farrell’s poems create permeable soundscapes and supple sound-sculptures. ‘the wood/ the hooded drive/ chomp into the frosty spoon/ sun reversing the day/ each veiled instruction never veiled enough/ altered for the cult/ chomp into the frosty spoon’ (‘n orthodox’). Versions of pastoral for the age of remix, these are impressive works.
The Hunter Valley was the great coalfield of New South Wales, a less glamorous scene of mining activity than the Gold Rush settlements of Victoria, but supportive of a large population, a port city (Newcastle) and many small towns. Kurri Kurri was one of these, Greg McLaren was born there, and his new poetry collection traces a journey of memory into its streets and fringe areas: ‘flooded quarries and mines, and a wide flap of bush/ giddy with being mapped and surveyed for coal/ and lost children’ (‘A clearing with a town’). The speaker of the poems can seem one of those ‘lost children’, voicing a longing for family, yet acknowledging a dysfunctional reality. ‘Eyes the colour of rust run in the family:/ eyes that celebrate nothing/ they mourn by going off/ into the next room/ We can’t say a thing,/ our faces are decoys, our brothers have disappeared/ down a street off a street in Queensland’ (‘Lost’). It is a tight-lipped world, melancholy like Edward Hopper paintings: ‘In summer there, everything hums/ with surface’ (‘Everything family’). And maybe because neither the family nor its dwelling places can be made to yield symbolic certainties, the poetry recreates a remembered childhood environment as intensely fascinating in its own right. The sounds, smells, tactilities and visuals of ‘Greyhounds at dusk’ combine to make a richly detailed, non-judgemental and unpretentious portrait of semi-rural life. ‘there’s talk/ of running the bitch through her paces,/ claiming the insurance on the car:/ I’ve got a cousin can help you with that./ Thin dogs, chasing stuffed rabbit smell,/ arf and wheeze’ The stability not found in family is sought more formally through Buddhism – ‘be a stillness in my centre/ so I might find a centre’. The title poem is a Buddhist-inflected elegy for kids who died young and shockingly fast, while ‘Buddhism Decoder’ creates a Buddhist-inflected mode of living as habit and joke, destabilising after all. ‘I knock the ceramic black Buddha/ from the bookcase/ to the floor./ Brought up Methodist, I panic/ at his broken head: eons in hells!’ The book also includes ‘And no bird sing’, a sequence crafted from the transcripts of Max Harris’ 1944 trial for obscenity after he published the ‘Ern Malley’ poems. The laconism, the near-whimsicality – all this opinionated yet weirdly stultified testimony – play oddly but effectively against the ‘Kurri Kurri’ poems, suggesting reasons not to be nostalgic.
In π.o.’s hands inter-language – transitional between Greek and English – is a multivalent, time-travelling demotic. It’s a medium for sociopolitical portraiture that un-seams ‘official’ history, and constitutes a sturdy yet open-topped – maybe open-sided as well – vehicle for a tour of Australian mores, shibboleths, intra-cultural border disputes, violences and rationalisations from 1949 onwards. But ‘tour’ sounds a bit too uninvolved; this poetry puts you there, in the cafes and on the streets, in working-class and/ or demimonde (petty crim and heavier duty crim) milieus. They’re all brought to life through an acute listening ear and something of a dramatist’s flair for scene-setting: ‘The streets are deserted./ The Boys walk-out (onto the footpath ( ( into/ the warm, air ) )/ towards Zorba’s./ As they get to the frontdoor ‘3 Fingers Johnny’/ comes down the stairs, recognises one of ‘em, and Opens/ the door. (Only) the little Italian bloke (behind/ the counter) didn’t like it and/ starts going baserk!’ (from ‘Zorba’s’) Every apparent visual oddity in the text – the bracketing, the bolding, the quotation marks, the italics, the seemingly reckless enjambement – is a precise scoring of the soundscape and the mind-sets that are pumping it. Big Numbers is indispensable; the most generous sampling yet of the life’s work of an anarchic spirit, a brilliant talent. Kerry Leves is a NSW poet. © Kerry Leves Like this piece? Subscribe! |
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