Chris Mansell’s Foxline

Posted on 22 April 2024 | Leave a comment

Chris Mansell, Foxline (Flying Island 2021)

Chris Mansell is an Australian poet with an impressive list of books and awards to her name. She has also played a significant role in fostering and publishing other poets. Here’s a link to her website. Foxline is part of Flying Island’s Pocket Poets Series, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, but offering a substantial reading experience.

The book’s last page has a note describing its genesis:

I came across a fenceline of foxes scalped and strung by their hind legs on the boundary fence of a farm. There were about two hundred dead and even dead they were beautiful. … I imagined the farmer, perhaps less articulate than the fox. I imagined him walking the paddocks in stolid opposition to the creatures that were taking his sheep.
It is real and it is also traditional. It is in his blood as it is in the blood of the fox to hunt and feed their young.

Each of the book’s 30 poems is spoken by the farmer or a fox. In most of the fox poems the speaker is a female fox; occasionally we hear from a young male, and even once or twice a flying fox. Both Fox and Man (they are capitalised in the marginal notes) are interested in more than each other, but mainly the poems deal with their relationship: their antagonism, their attempts to understand each other, and their recognition of what they have in common. They even manage to learn from each other.

In one poem (‘Dark Solo’) a young male fox becomes the fox in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-Fox’. But the literary work I was most strongly reminded of is Roald Dahl’s The Marvellous Mister Fox. In some ways Mansell’s book could be read as an adult response to Dahl’s. Here there is no easy resolution to the conflict between Man and Fox and, contrary to what you might expect from Mansell’s account of the book’s origins, both characters elicit our sympathy.

Before I talk about page 77*, I want to name my favourite stanza in the book. It’s the beginning of ‘Surprise’, one of the Man’s poems, and is a haiku-like stanza (or more accurately senryu-like, as haiku aren’t supposed to mention people):

we are always surprised
here every winter
we are amazed it's cold

The poem goes on to arrive, elegantly, at how we are ‘astounded / by death especially’. I love the way the poem makes poetry from an often-heard New-South-Wales joke, then takes it somewhere unexpected but completely right.

Page 77 is the beginning of the poem, ‘He relates their conversation’.

HE RELATES THEIR CONVERSATION

Like every poem in the book, this one has a note in the margin telling us who is speaking and offering a brief summary, the way some 18th century novels do, as if acknowledging that the semi-articulate protagonists don’t always make themselves clear:

The Man 
recounts the 
Fox's wisdom

The italics on this page signify that though the Man is speaking, he is relating the Fox’s words. The Fox’s ‘wisdom’ is paradoxical:

fox says sometimes of our friendship
I think it is failure that keeps
us together

In what way are they together? And whose failure does she mean? An obvious meaning is that ‘together’ really means ‘both alive in the same locality’, and the failure is that of the Man – he has failed in his quest to kill the fox. But the word ‘friendship’ in the first line suggests that something else is going on. Its cryptic possibilities provide the impetus to read on.

that I should fail in certain ways 
be unkept and poor to be less 
approved of in the field

Before she gets to ‘friendship’, the Fox expands on what she means by ‘failure’. She is the one who must fail. To understand ‘in certain ways’ we don’t need to think beyond the Fox’s activity as sheep-killer. If she succeeds in killing or even damaging the Man’s livestock that’s the end of any fellow-feeling. ‘Unkept’ is an example of the way the Fox’s language is interestingly off-kilter throughout the book. It’s not quite ‘unkempt’ though it possibly includes that. It suggests the opposite of ‘well-kept’ as in well-fed. The fox needs to be bad at her job – ‘less / approved of’ in the field’ by other foxes, perhaps.

you have the rifle 
your freedoms and fiefdoms are
what you choose_ your limits

and your boundaries are bought 
owned certified and succinct

(The double space in the third line here acts as a break in the meaning – a full stop.) But yes, the Man must also fail in his quest to eliminate the fox. He has the means, but he can choose to act freely or according to an imposed order. ‘Freedoms and fiefdoms’ is a wonderfully evocative phrase: is this farmer a free operative or is he pretty much a serf in the current economic order? It’s his choice. the limits and boundaries are those of the farm, but they are also limitations and constrictions on himself that he has bought into.

I wear the orange and you the black

On first reading, I had no idea what this meant. Now that I’ve pondered the previous lines, its meaning leaps out at me. The Fox is making an analogy to sporting teams – Australian cricketers wear the baggy greens, Indians the bleed blues. The Fox and the Man belong on different teams.

I won’t go on in detail about the remaining page and a bit. In short, the man now speaks in his own voice, expressing a wish to become the Fox, and they recognise the similarity between the rifle and the fox’s ‘whitesharp teeth’. According to an explanatory side note:

They know 
they have a 
tense 
commonality

‘Tense commonality’ is an excellent human-prose translation of the Fox’s term ‘friendship’.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

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Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry

Posted on 16 April 2024 | 1 comment

Robbie Coburn, Ghost Poetry (Upswell Press 2024)

Ghost Poetry‘s back cover blurb includes a discreet trigger warning:

Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.

I agree that these poems are beautifully crafted and confronting, but I wouldn’t say I was actually scarred by them. They do deal with tough subjects – self harm, addiction, the mental health system, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, abortion, rape and more. But there are also horses, a love-poetry thread, and always the sense that the poetry is doing much more than giving vent to pain and suffering, and not at all playing for shocks.

Some of the poems are presented as accounts of dreams, of nightmares really, and many others have a dreamlike quality. Perhaps more accurately, in many of the poems the border between waking and dreaming is blurred so that the emotional intensity and weird logic of nightmare suffuses the daylight world. Sometimes the speaker seems to be a ghost.

A partial list of the titles in ‘Blood Ritual’, the first of the book’s three sections, gives an idea of what I mean: ‘Dream of Human Sacrifice’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Dream of Scarification’, ‘Cutter’, ‘Dream of Suicide’, ‘Bloodletting’, ‘Dream of Abortion’, ‘I Dreamed I Saw You on a Bridge’, ‘Asylum’. I’m not being entirely flippant when I say it was a relief to read the opening lines of ‘Poetry’, the final poem in the section:

I am tired of these poems;

you can only write your own death
so many times before
you begin to plan for its arrival.

The second section, ‘Wreck’, is filled with horses, and love poems. Again, there is a lot of pain, but also moments of delight as in ‘Foals’, where the poem’s speaker addresses a loved one. You don’t need to have been around newborn foals or calves to be moved by the poem’s final lines, though you may need to have been in love:

as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass

like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk.

If I had to name a single subject (always a bit of a mug’s game) of the third section, ‘Straw Horses’, I’d say it was love for someone in pain:

I want to touch your tortured bones 
as if my hands were gauze.

But my practice of looking at page 77 demonstrates that it’s not just the loved one who is in pain. ‘Love Poem to a Razorblade’ is not the only one that deals with flesh being cut, in other poems mostly by knives, in dreams, and the flesh not necessarily that of the speaker. Here the subject is definitely self-harm:

It’s a hard poem to write about. As I was drafting this blog post, an article by Rose Cartwright in the Guardian Online threw me a lifeline. It included this:

‘What happened here?’ a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
‘I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – ‘I was mentally ill’ – no longer felt right.

I was the poster girl for OCD, Guardian 13 April 2024

This poem sets out to bridge that awkward silence. You will read it differently depending on the experience you bring to it. For myself, I’ve never had a compulsion to self-harm, at least not of the cutting kind, and my relevant experience is limited to conversations with parents of young ‘cutters’. One of the main things I’ve gleaned is that communication is problematic: the young person can’t talk about what’s happening and/or the person wanting to help can’t bear to hear what they’re trying to say. That difficulty is at the heart of this poem.

I don’t know if Robbie Coburn is writing from his own lived experience, or as an extraordinary act of empathetic imagination. Either way, the poem calls on the reader to attend to a voice that is rarely heard.

Love Poem to a Razorblade

Anyone who has ever been addicted to anything harmful – cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, chocolate – recognises the paradox. If, as a person with high blood pressure, I were to write ‘Love Poem to a Fried Dim Sim’, the tone would be different: despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a fried dim sim habit is only mildly stigmatised, certainly not seen as ‘mental illness’. But the paradox is similar. The behaviour is doing me no good, but I am drawn to it. It’s not too much of a stretch to call that love.

The first lines are full of possibilities:

As a child I knew
I could keep you hidden.

I turned away from the past 
and saw your mouth open 
and cover me.

First there’s secretiveness. This isn’t about guilt. It’s not ‘should’, but ‘could’ – there’s a kind of power there. But the question hovers: ‘Hidden from whom?’ From someone who would punish or shame the young one, probably. The next line provokes an allied question, ‘What happened in the past that I had to turn away from it?’ As I read it, the speaker had an (unspecified) unbearable experience as a child and, unable to turn to a human for comfort, somehow turned to the razor blade, to self harm.

I struggle to visualise a contemporary razor blade with an open mouth, but those from my childhood, and I’m guessing from the much younger Robbie Coburn’s, could be flexed so that the opening along the middle would open out. All the same, it’s impossible to visualise this ‘mouth’ covering someone. The lines are after an emotional truth rather than a visual image – the possibilities of the blade enclosed the young person in a protective cover against whatever he was turning away from.

you told me love wasn't a word 
to be spoken
but a scar cut into the surface 
of the body.

anybody you love in this world
will mark you.

A human comforter would have said something (‘It’s all right, ‘You’re OK,’ ‘This will pass’ …). The razor blade’s ‘mouth’ had no words, its message is conveyed, recorded, imprinted, by action.

But there’s more to these lines than that. They don’t dwell on the act of cutting – the welling blood, the pain, etc – which happens in the moment, like a word. The message is in the aftermath, the enduring scar, in the surface of the body but also in the mind, an expectation that love will involve damage. But not necessarily damage! In another context that last couplet could have a completely benign meaning: isn’t it true, and interesting, that if you love somebody they have an effect on you, leave a mark on you? Here, though, ‘mark’ carries a strong negative meaning.

I believed you;
each promise immovable, 
every moment between us 
carved into permanence.

The message from the razor blade is that those effects and marks are solid, scarlike, immovable, permanent. If there’s grief or humiliation in a relationship, you will remain grief-stricken or humiliated forever. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. It’s not just self-harm that lodges such messages in the mind, of course. Don’t we all have moments in our childhood that have created templates for how we expect the world to always be?

even when you were taken 
you have never left me –

It’s childhood experience that has been described so far. ‘When you were taken’ implies an intervention that stopped the self-harm, possibly at an early age. But the effect of those moments persists. 

the blood was ours, 
every night we were alone, 
silently holding you in secret.

In this last triplet, having reflected on the long term effects of cutting, the speaker can at last look at the moment itself. Only now, can he name the blood, and evoke the (creepy) romance of the moment. I think of the song from Calamity Jane, ‘Once I had a secret love‘, and though I can’t articulate it I know that I’ve been taken somewhere.

While writing this, I have had to walk away from the computer every now and then and breathe for a while. You can feel the poet’s steely will as he holds his mind to this subject, honouring its complexity.

It’s a gruelling book, but rewarding.

I am grateful to Robbie Coburn for my copy of Ghost Poetry.

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Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister, page 77

Posted on 9 April 2024 | 3 comments

Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister (jukurrpa books, 2004)

Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Yagera of Minjerribah (aka Stradbroke Island) and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. She is a poet, spoken word performer, philosopher and filmmaker. A brief showreel from the transmedia work One Billion Beats (2016), which she co-wrote and co-directed with Alanna Valentine, gives a powerful glimpse of her stage and screen presence, as well as her incisive writing (link here). Also on Vimeo is a profound lecture she gave about that work (link here), which discusses the colonial gaze and dissects colonial cinematic representations of Indigenous people.

Post Me to the Prime Minister, a collection of poems published in 2004, 12 years before that formidable work, also deals with issues faced by First Nations people. As I was reading it, I kept wishing I could see Romaine Moreton perform them. I’ve just been told that she opened for Sweet Honey in the Rock at the Sydney Opera House on one of their visits to Australia, which makes complete sense. The short film she made with Erica Glynn, A Walk with Words: The Poetry of Romaine Moreton (2024), ends with her performing the book’s final poem, ‘I will surprise you by my will’ (you can rent or purchase the whole film at this link). The poem is in the film’s trailer:

we are here and we are many,
and we shall surprise you by our will,
we wll rise from this place where you expect 
to keep us down,
and we shall surprise you by our will.

There are so many riches in this collection, but I’ll stick to my arbitrary practice of singling out page 77. It’s the second page of a long poem, ‘Once upon a patriarchy’. Here’s a pic of pages 76 and 77:

The book’s title comes from the poem’s opening lines:

truth be known,
you would very much prefer it 
if I were male

oh yes you would wrap me in glad tidings 
and post me to the prime minister and say 
how proud we are

___ our son

Things have moved a long way since the moment in the 1972 movie Ningla A-Na when Indigenous women argued vehemently that sexism was a white women’s issue, that Indigenous women needed to support Indigenous men and not challenge their sexist behaviour. More than 30 years later, this poem’s speaker doesn’t have to be defensive about the ‘colonial gaze’; it’s not written with a non-Indigenous reader foremost in mind. The strength of First Nations communities no longer depends on papering over the cracks of lateral oppression.

It’s not easy to tell who ‘you’ is in this poem. At first it may be the speaker’s parents, or perhaps a part of the First Nations population that has a parent-like relationship to her. But it shifts, and by the start of page 77 it is a First Nations man, ‘our son‘, who is being addressed. He’s a man who wishes ‘to walk as the colonial / hallowed one’. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see him as similar to the would-be assimilationist Tomahawk in Alexis Wright’s great novel Praiseworthy (2023), or perhaps as a member of Chelsea Watego’s ’emerging tribe’ of self-appointed leaders (see the essay ‘ambiguously Indigenous’ in Another Day in the Colony, also published in 2023).

for while you vie 
for the passenger seat
the cattle truck is loaded for market
you have left me golden hallowed son

dragging 
in
the never-never

This is beautifully complicated. There’s sibling rivalry – ‘golden hallowed son’ is a variant on ‘golden-haired boy’, the favoured sibling, favoured partly because he’s male. But it’s not just that. He has decided to be part of the action, be up front in the cattle truck, join in the extractive farming of the land. He’s not in the driver’s seat, not in charge of his own destiny, but has attached himself to the power. To reinforce the farm metaphor, the poem brings in the Australian colonial ‘classic’, Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn’s We of the Never Never (1908). I haven’t read that book, but I’m pretty sure its account of Mangarayi and Yungman who were displaced by the Elsey cattle station, and worked on it, fits the tone of these lines – a place to be left dragging.

The next lines continue to reproach, and to remind the ‘son’ of the loyalty shown by Black women. (See the scene in Ningla A-Na mentioned above.)

and while I never ever forget you 
you gladly allow me – the black female
to rot

like the wife of Lot 
though I have never 
turned
I captured you to my breast 
always remembered 
what is best

for my people 
for my people

Whatever else is going on with the ‘son’ his maleness is key, as is the speaker’s femaleness. The reference to Lot’s wife (who looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment) broadens the picture: women have always been punished. In this case, though, there’s not even the pretext of he having done something wrong.

If you weren’t noticing the music of the poem previously, you can’t help but hear it here. These lines, with the rhyming of ‘rot’ and ‘Lot’, introduce a new rhythm that builds, with the rhyme of ‘breast’ and rest’, to the lovely repetition of ‘for my people’. When performing some of her poems, Romaine Moreton moves from spoken word to song. These lines cry out for that treatment.

One of my favourite words in poetry is ‘but’. And here it comes:

but you
golden hallowed blackened son 
more despised there is none

The ‘son’ is not just ‘golden hallowed’, but ‘golden hallowed blackened’: sitting in the passenger’s seat doesn’t make him immune from racism. ‘Blackened’ is an interesting word here: it signifies First Nations identity, but also colonial attitudes. He may think of himself as the golden son, but his Black identity will be imposed on him and he will be seen accordingly through a colonial lens: ‘none more despised’. That’s something that the man on the receiving end of racism would readily agree to. And then the killer lines:

except one

which is me

That’s not the end of the poem, it does move on interestingly, but it’s all I’m looking at here.

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Richard Osman’s Last Devil to Die and the Bullet that Missed

Posted on 6 April 2024 | 3 comments

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
and The Bullet That Missed
(both audiobooks from Audible, performed by Fiona Shaw)

These are numbers 3 and 4 of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries, in which a group of friends an English retirement village meet of a Thursday, between the Chess Club and the Yoga Class, to solve murders. It’s like a blend of Miss Marple and the Five Finder-outers, both of which I loved with a passion, one when I was about nine years old and the other three or four years later. Even though these stories involve nastier crimes than Agatha Christie’s ancient sleuth or Enid Blyton’s ingenious children, listening to them on long car rides transported me back to those earlier pleasures.

We listened to them out of order. The Last Devil‘s first murder victim (there are several in each book) is alive and well in The Bullet, and though we understand why the club members want to solve his murder – he was a friend of one of them – it was only on reading the earlier book that we understood the nature of the friendship, and realised that what seems an improbable plot twist is actually completely in character. On the other hand, it was fun to see where Book 3 includes hints and foreshadowings of Book 4’s revelations.

Richard Osman appears regularly on UK panel shows. Pointless, the game show he developed and co-presented, was a pleasure to watch, and – to judge by the irritating quality of its Australian version – its success owed a lot to his self-deprecatory erudition. Those qualities shine through in these stories. We don’t really care about the vast quantities of lost heroin in Book 4 or the massive financial fraud in Book 3 except as MacGuffins. What matters is the way this group of people who couldn’t be more different from one another are thrown together by the accident of old age and become strong friends. There’s a former trade union official, an almost retired psychiatrist, a former spy who was high up in MI6, and Joyce who is endlessly interested in what’s cheap at the supermarket, what’s happening in her regular TV shows, the comings and goings of the village.

There are romances among the septuagenarians and especially in Book 4 some finely judged moments of pathos. Just as the reader thinks the present adventures are enough to sustain the interest, there are poignant excursions into the characters’ back stories – and one realises that the basic reality of being old is that one has a past.

Fiona Shaw’s reading – performance really – of both books is wonderful, and at the end of Book 4 she and Richard Osman have a conversation that sheds light both on his intentions in writing the books and her approach to reading more than 10 hours of text incorporating the voices of something like a dozen characters.

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The Essays of Montaigne, progress report 1

Posted on 4 April 2024 | 1 comment

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) Book 1, from beginning to part way through Essay 26, ‘On educating children’
and also
Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete, translated by Charles Cotton 1877 (Project Gutenberg, 2004)
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Penguin Classics 1959, selected and translated by J. M. Cohen)
Michel de Montaigne , What Do I Know? Essential Essays (Pushkin Press 2023, selected and translated by David Coward with an introduction by Yiyun Li)

I started my slow read of Montaigne’s essays at the beginning of March. It took me until the middle of the month to settle on a text.

I began with a library copy of the Penguin Classic edition translated by J. M. Cohen, which turns out to be a selection of about a third of the essays. I began filling in the gaps from Project Gutenberg’s ponderous 1877 translation by Charles Cotton. Then for a birthday present I was given What Do I Know, a much smaller selection in a much smoother translation with a welcoming introduction by novelist Yiyun Li. At last, I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, I bought the Penguin Classic Complete Essays which features M. A. Screech’s 1991 translation. With occasional back and forth to compare translations, that’s the text I’m now reading, and page numbers refer to it unless I indicate otherwise.

With my slow-reads, I take it as a sign that I’ve chosen a true classic when I come across references in other reading. Montaigne cropped up at least twice this month.

On 8 March, the Guardian‘s agony aunt Eleanor Gordon-Smith ended a column with this:

Montaigne thought you only get one true friend in your lifetime. You’re allowed to decide a given person isn’t yours.

That may come from a web search for quotes on friendship rather than Eleanor’s immersion in Montaigne. In Hisham Matar’s My Friends (my blog post here), the Libyan writer Hosam knows Montaigne well enough to disagree with him:

‘Is there anything more depressing than a wall of books? But you, my dear, disagree. Like Montaigne, you believe that the very presence of books in your room cultivates you, that books are not only to be read but to be lived with.’

(Hisham Matar, My Friends, page 321)

I haven’t come across Montaigne’s belief about books yet, but one of his charms is that he doesn’t expect the reader to agree with him.

What can I report after a month of reading a little Montaigne each morning? Well, the thing that stands out most obviously, which is also for me the main obstacle to straightforward enjoyment, is his frequent reference to writers of antiquity – sometimes in direct quotations of the Greek or Latin (mercifully translated into English in all the versions I have), sometime in recounted anecdotes. I tend to get lost as these references accumulate, but on a good morning they add to the charm of the essays.

‘On educating children’, the essay I am currently reading, is the longest so far at 37 pages. In the previous essay, whose title M. A. Creech translates respectfully as ‘On Schoolmasters’ learning’, whereas others, Charles Cotton included, call it ‘Of Pedantry’, there’s a lovely moment when Montaigne, having castigated a certain kind of schoolmasterly person for quoting from the classics too much, beats the reader to the punch:

Such foolishness fits my own case marvellously well. Am I for the most part not doing the same when assembling my material? Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me – not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to this book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place.

(Page 154)

In ‘On educating children’, he characteristically takes his time getting to the subject in hand, and spends a couple of pages discussing the role of quotations, and defends himself against his own mocking self-accusation:

I  undertake to write without preconceptions on any subject which comes to mind, employing nothing but my own natural resources: then if (as happens often) I chance to come across in excellent authors the very same topics I have undertaken to treat … I acknowledge myself to be so weak, so paltry, so lumbering and so dull compared with such men, that I feel scorn and pity for myself. I do congratulate myself, however, that my opinions frequentlty coincide with theirs.

(Page 164)

Hmm, that ‘often’ is to be emphasised, but his point, even the false modesty, rings true.

I’m pretty much out of time for this post. I should mention pleasure: there’s a lot of that in these essays. I mean the pleasure of reading, but there’s also pleasure as subject matter, even one or two discreetly bawdy passages. Montaigne and I will probably be conversing in the morning for the rest of the year. I hope to bring you interesting tidbits every month

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What happened to Nina, Dervla McTiernan

Posted on 29 March 2024 | 19 comments

Dervla McTiernan, What Happened to Nina? (Harper Collins 2024; audiobook by Audible, performed by Kristen Sieh, Stacy Glemboski, Lisa Flanagan, Robert Petkoff, George Newbern, Jenna Lamia and Preston Butler III)

I used to read to the Emerging Artist on long car journeys. Then my voice started failing, and for a couple of years we’ve been trying podcasts and audiobooks, with mixed results.

What Happened to Nina worked like a charm. For a start, each of seven characters narrates at least one chapter, and each character has their own reader, so there is plenty of vocal variation. More significantly, the book reads like a television show: locations are established efficiently, introspection is minimal, dialogue and action are pacy, motivations straightforward. Perfect for listening to when part of your mind is on the passing scene. (I know there are people who do their serious reading this way. I’m not disciplined enough for that.)

I’ve read and enjoyed two of Dervla McTiernan’s previous books, The Rúin (link is to my blog post) and The Good Turn. They’re both police procedurals set in Ireland, and apart from the mystery to be solved in each of them, what I enjoyed was the sense of place, and the Irish ness.

In What Happened to Nina? there is no mystery. Twenty-year-old Nina narrates the first section, and then goes missing. The reader can guess the what, who, why, where, and pretty much how right from the start, and becomes quite sure within a couple of chapters. The novel is interested in how the disappearance is dealt with by the other characters, especially her parents and the parents of her boyfriend, who is also the chief suspect. As they gradually discover the truth, there are two harsh surprises, but no real twists. And though the logistics are carefully plotted, the Vermont environment doesn’t come alive, and the dialogue, while recognisably American, has a generic feel to it. (That’s no criticism of the readers/performers, who are universally excellent.)

So yeah, this is OK. It feels to me that it’s written with a possible US TV adaptation in mind. If that happens, it could be a successful series. I might watch it.

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Journal Catch-up 22

Posted on 28 March 2024 | 2 comments

Two more journals in my endless attempt to keep up to date!

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland 251 (Winter 2023)
(Some of the content is online at the Overland website, and I’ve included links)

As always, this issue of Overland is full of good things. In particular, there’s ‘Close to the subject‘ by Bundjalung and Kullilli journalist Daniel Browning, whose mellifluous voice is familiar to me from his stint as presenter of ABC’s Awaye. The book Close to the Subject was published by Magabala Books in 2023. On the strength of this essay, it’s worth reading. Of his time as a journalist for the ABC, Browning writes:

My stories are always collaborative, and I try to produce content that represents not simply the who, what and why — but the cultural context in which these dialogues take place. I no longer excise myself from my stories, as I used to do (although I always insist that my team practise a simple rule: you are always the least important person in the room). … [The kind of journalism I practise] is one which embeds my blackfella subjectivity. It centres my own story, but only to make clear that I am in relationship with the person I am conversing with. By establishing my own credentials, I am drawing a reflexive enclosing circle around the conversation – its cultural context.

(page 51)

There are a other excellent articles on First Nations Issues from Barry Corr and Hana Pera Aoke, essays on literary matters, and a heart-wrenching episode of World War Two history from Bill Gammage.

The poetry section is wonderfully rich. I’ll just mention ‘Nothing out of the ordinary‘ by Heather Taylor-Johnson. The speaker of the poem lists any number of extraordinary adventures – mainly involving skydiving – that, she says, never happened. The negative is clearly ironic in some way, and you live with the tension of that until the very last line. It wasn’t until I heard Heather Taylor-Johnson read the poem at an Avant-Gaga evening at Sappho’s cafe that I realised with full force that (excuse the spoiler) the poem is an elegy.

Of the stories, ‘The expectations of sparrows’ by Jane Downing (which the website has tagged ‘online soon’) stands out. Its opening sentence, ‘Mavis was contemplating death,’ led me to expect one more story about a young woman suffering from depression as a result of chaotic sexual experiences or worse. But no! Mavis is in a cemetery when a pimply young man approaches her with a proposition involving his desecrating some graves and the two of them sharing the reward when she dobs him in. It’s a tale centred on a solid ethical dilemma, with some finely judged twists.

Alexandra Christie (editor), Heat Series 3 Nº 11 (Giramondo 2023)

I’m not getting on well with Heat. According to its website, it has always aimed to ‘publish innovative Australian and international writers of the highest standard’. The current issue accordingly includes work by two Australian writers and two international writers. So far so good. But look a bit closer and see that of the Australian writers one is listed as a publisher of Heat, and the other is on the editorial advisory board, while one of the ‘international’ writers and both translators live in the USA. Is all excellence, one wonders, to be found within the Heat family or imported from the USA? Must all translations into English include words like ‘faucet’ and ‘gotten’?

Evelyn Juers’ ‘Totality in Wallal. Woolf in Yorkshire. Einstein in Scharbeutz.’ is the high point of the issue, an essay on biography as a form, full of fascinating details from the lives and influence of its subjects. I enjoyed the three prose poems (flash fictions?) from Suneeta Peres da Costa, and the excerpt from Sara Mesa’s novel Un Amor, translated by Katie Whittemore, delivers a terrific final twist that made me almost forgive its leaking faucet. (The excerpt is on the Heat website.)

I hope to be less grumpy in my next journal catch-up.

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Steve Armstrong, What’s Left

Posted on 25 March 2024 | 1 comment

Steve Armstrong, What’s Left (Flying Island Poets 2021)

The Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series books are close to irresistible. They’re beautifully designed and small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, but much more substantial in their content than their size might suggest. The RRP has been kept at $10 since the series began in 2010, and it’s possible to become a Friend for an annual fee of $100 to receive roughly 12 books each year.

I recently became a Friend, and received What’s Left, published in 2021, along with the swag of 2024 titles.

Steve Armstrong is a Newcastle poet. I like Mark Tredinnick’s description of him as a poet of ‘landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss’. Mark Tredinnick may be the Mark to whom the poem ‘This Morning’ (page 58) is dedicated – a poem that has the brilliant opening lines:

_____________ my sorrows pause
for a pair of black cockatoos in flight.

It’s probably pushing it to take those lines as encapsulating the book’s themes: but there are plenty of sorrows, and plenty of attentiveness to the natural world. The sorrows include regret, or at least ambivalence at having wielded axes and chain-saws. I enjoyed a lot in these poems, but probably most of all the way they communicate complexity. Sometimes they do this with a comic edge, as in ‘A Visit ot the Turkey Farm’ (page 33), in which the poem’s speaker buys two boxes of frozen turkey necks, takes them home and chops them up, in his kitchen, with an axe. If there’s a perfectly rational explanation for all this, the poem doesn’t bother with it. I don’t usually quote the final lines of poems, but this is irresistible:

To swing an axe in the kitchen feels

a little like reaching back for my hunter-
gatherer roots, and it's undeniable, there's

something of a serial killer about me too.

The book’s title is rich with possibility. I happened to visit the Melbourne Triennial when I had read to page 50 or so, and can’t resist including here a snap of the life-sized figure hanging from the ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria entitled What’s Left.

Elmgreen & Dragset,
What’s left, fig. 2
at the Melbourne Triennial

Judging by the couple of poems about children and grandchildren, Steve Armstrong isn’t as young and buff as this figure, and though the climate crisis looms in these pages, the the tone is perhaps more elegiac than panicky. The title poem, ‘What’s Left’ (page 10) offers the image of light falling on what’s left of red in a rusted iron roof: ‘light / falls for the broken’ in that poem and perhaps in the collection as a whole.

If you get a chance to read ‘Thirteen Ways to Know my Grandfather’, grab it. It won the 2019 local prize in the prestigiousNewcastle Poetry Prize and was included in NPP’s 2019 anthology Soft Serve. This is no cuddly grandpa, but a man who tyrannised his children (‘my mother learned to redact’) and grandchildren, including possibly some sexual abuse. The poem doesn’t rest in victimhood or resentment, but embraces complexity, not only in the grandfather’s wartime experience as explanation of his ‘thousand yard stare’, but also in an understanding of what he needed from his grandchildren:

he relied on us to be swift of mind.
_____________________________ We were the morning sun
glancing off the many faces of a still, dark mountain; 
our percipience bound by what we could bear.

Since 2021, Steve Armstrong has had another book of poetry published: One River (Puncher & Wattmann 2023) is a series of haibun written in response to walking the Hunter River and its tributaries.

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Hisham Matar, My Friends, the book club, page 77

Posted on 18 March 2024 | 5 comments

Hisham Matar, My Friends (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: Hisham Matar was a guest at the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival. On a panel titled ‘Resist!’ which was mainly concerned with the recent election of Donald Trump as President of the USA, he enriched the conversation by referring back to his own childhood in Qaddafi’s Libya, where he wondered who was more sculpted by the regime, those who actively served its interests or those who dedicated themselves to resisting it. He argued powerfully for the importance of complexity, of remaining true to one’s own authentic self. (My blog post here.)

In My Friends, when the narrator, Khaled, is a teenager in Benghazi, he and his family hear a short story read over the BBC. It’s a kind Kafkaesque version of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, in which the word ‘no’ has tremendous power. Nobody spells it out, but we understand that it’s a heavily coded advocacy for non-compliance with the Qaddafi regime. (By the end of the book, we understand it could equally refer to refusal to take up arms.) The young narrator, partly inspired by the story, leaves Libya to study at Edinburgh University.

In 1984, he and his friend Mustafa evade the surveillance of their fellow Libyan students and travel to London to join a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy. When the crowd is fired on from inside the embassy (this really happened), they are seriously injured. Unknown to them, the writer of the short story – Hosam – is also at the demonstration, but walks away uninjured. All three of them are now exiles.

The novel traces the way the lives of these three men intertwine, how their friendships grow, how each of them deals with the pain of separation from family and country, and how each responds to the changing political news from home. The Arab Spring of 2010 brings things to a head: the question is now whether to return to join the revolt against Qaddafi, or to continue with the lives they have built away from home, however insubstantial.

On page 77, Khaled is walking the streets of London, remembering when he and Mustafa first came there for the demonstration which would radically alter the course of their lives. His memories leap forward to the period years later when he and Hosam were walking those same streets, with Hosam enthusing about literary history attached to those places. Both the anecdotes on this page touch on major themes of the book.

At the start of the page Hosam has just relayed gossip that when Karl Marx is said to have been ‘sweating it out’ in the British Library, he was actually visiting his mistress in Soho:

‘I like imagining him shuttling back and forth between the two lives. And, anyway, doesn’t his prose hint at this? I don’t mean that it’s duplicitous necessarily, but that it endlessly sidesteps one thing so as to reach for another … ?’

Regarding characters, this is Hosam, six years older than Khaled, showing off his sophistication. Thematically, his description of Marx’s prose could equally be describing Khaled’s approach to life: it never quite commits himself to a clear position. Even in these early pages when he describes his participation in the demonstration, he oscillates between saying he waas led there by Mustafa and taking responsibility for his own decision.

It strikes me that I could draw up a list of all the writers and works mentioned in the early pages of this book and have a reading schedule for a year. There’s not just Marx, and further on this page Conrad, and much of the western canon (including Montaigne, my current early-morning read), but a whole world of Arabic writing including, for example, the Sudanese poet Nizar Qabbani, the Lebanese novelist Salim el Lozi, and Khaled’s father’s favourite poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri. Conrad, who wrote in English away from his native Poland, crops up a lot.

As we were walking down Beak Street, he said, ‘Have I shown you this yet?’ and shot down a narrow alleyway barely wide enough for a man to lie down. It had the unsuitable name of Kingly Street.
‘It’s here,’ he said and crossed to the other side. ‘No, here, yes, this is it, where one night, very late in the hour, Joseph Conrad, believing himself to be pursued by a Russian spy, took out his pocketknife and hid, waiting. As soon as his pursuer appeared, Conrad sneaked up behind him and slit his throat.’
The story was so farfetched that it did not deserve any attention, but what I remember most was the strange excitement that came over Hosam then.
‘It was probably why,’ he went on to say, ‘soon after this, Conrad, despite all the friends he had in London and his burning literary ambition, moved to the country, where he could look out of his window and be able to see from afar if an enemy were approaching.’

I’ve got no idea if this anecdote is Hisham Matar’s invention – a web search found nothing – but Hosam’s excitement in telling it signals a parallel with his own trajectory. By the time he tells it, he has abandoned his writing career, and like all three of the friends, he is intensely aware that he has enemies in Qaddafi’s regime.

Hosam never explains in so many words why he no longer writes, and is unmoved by his friends’ urgings. It’s through moments like this remembered anecdote that we are able to glean what is going on: Conrad’s withdrawal after killing the suspected agent is parallel to Hosam’s fear of detection and shame at his own silence after the 1984 demo.

The book’s opening words point to a feature of the narrative that this passage exemplifies:

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best

I don’t think we ever know what is going on in Khaled’s heart. For instance, when Qaddafi is being overthrown, he sits up all night listening to news and reading text messages from back home, but at work the next day he mumbles that he doesn’t pay much attention to the news. He is more forthcoming with the reader, but a stubborn silence remains.

There’s a lot more to say, but I’m out of time. There’s one wonderful scene I must mention. When after many years his family come to London to visit him, Khaled finally tells his father the real reason that he hasn’t come home, his participation in the 1984 demonstration and the wound he sustained. What happens next between father and son is profound. Here’s how it starts, as Khaled indicates the location of the scar:

‘Here,’ I said and pointed to my chest.
His manic fingers were all over me, trying to unbutton my shirt and pull it off at the same time. I gave him my back and did it myself. He took hold of my vest, and the child I once had been surrendered his arms. What happened next broke a crack through me.
My father, the tallest man I know, bowed and began to trace his fingers along my scar, reading it, turning around me as he followed its line, tears streaming down his face.
‘My boy, my boy,’ he whispered to himself.

(page 242)

Now I really am out of time.

After the meeting: The five of us discussed this book along with Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (blog post here). This one generated much more interesting conversation. Among other things, two of us had been to Libya when Qaddafi was still in power – for them, the descriptions of life in Benghazi stirred rich memories.

Most if not all of us had read at least one other book by Hisham Matar, The Return (my blog post here), Others had read either In the Country of Men (which I read with my other Book Group, blog post here) or A Month in Siena.

The one who had read A Month in Siena had been irritated by it because ‘nothing happened’. She had a similar complaint abut My Friends. Having enjoyed it up to the point of the demonstration, she was frustrated that instead of telling a story about Libyan politics, the narrative stalled and Khaled in particular settled for a boring uneventful life for most of the book. For others of us, that was the point – it’s a story of exile, and Khaled is stuck, caught between the yearning for home and the impossibility of going there. Yet another challenged the assertion that Khaled was stuck: he had a job teaching English literature, which was the great love of his life – what’s wrong with that? And as the narrator of this book, he is the one who gets to see the whole picture.

Speaking vaguely so as to avoid spoilers, there was some disagreement on how successfully the narrative placed its characters at key events in Libyan history. I thought it was audacious; others thought it was a weakness, a clumsy welding act.

We didn’t come to blows. Even the least enthusiastic among us enjoyed the book, and I think it’s true to say that we all learned a lot about, or were at least reminded of, recent Libyan history.

Also, we had a pleasant meal and heard epic tales of bathroom renovation.

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Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren, the book club, page 77

Posted on 17 March 2024 | 5 comments

Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape 2023)

Before the meeting: Carmel and Nell are mother and daughter. They have a complex relationship with each other, and terrible relationships with men: Carmel’s father Phil, a middlingly successful, womanising poet; Nell’s coercive, rapey on-and-off boyfriend Felim; an endlessly boring man who comes into Carmel’s life for a time; and so on. It seems that Phil’s long shadow is responsible for their misery. Tess writes online copy for an influencer.

The first couple of pages of The Wren, the Wren had me enthralled as the narrator describes a psychological experiment conducted by Russell T Hurlburt, a real person (here’s a link). The experiment deals with the fact that we can never know what is happening in another person’s mind. Sadly, I hadn’t read much further when I realised I had no idea what was in Anne Enright’s mind when she wrote the book. I couldn’t tell what mattered to her about the story, and it gave me no reason to keep reading.

I did read on, motivated pretty much entirely by the need to avoid being scolded at Book Club like the people who hadn’t read Killing for Country at our last meeting.

Nell and Carmel have alternating chapters, except for one chapter narrated by Phil. As far as I could tell, Phil’s chapter is there for the purpose of including some hideous animal cruelty that neither of the women could have witnessed. The book is punctuated by his (in my opinion) tedious poems.

Anne Enright’s style is smooth and there are moments that give joy: Nell’s state of mind after the first time she has sex with Felim (the only time she enjoys it); some nice reflections on the naming of birds in Australia; conversations between Nell and Carmel that capture a fine balance between love and irritated mutual incomprehension. But as a whole, this is one of the least engaging books I’ve read. It may be that this is my internalised patriarchal attitudes taking over my reading mind. If so, please put me right in the comments.

Meanwhile:

Page 77 is part of the description of Phil’s funeral. Though he was accustomed to slagging off his native town in USA talk shows, he had expressed a sentimental desire to be buried there. I suppose this page is darkly funny if you’re not as jaded with the book as I was. To me it just reads as cliché.

First there’s a bit of gratuitous dangerous-driving humour as Carmel is in a car following the hearse from Dublin airport where the body has been received:

The hearse went slowly for a while and then, at some secret moment, started belting along the road. It took the bends so fast, Carmel became a little fixated on the square end of the box disappearing up ahead. This chase went on for three hours, then the hearse slammed on the brakes and they were right on top of it again.

Then a bit of yokel humour. Or it may be a moment of pathos that segues into yokel humour. It’s a choose-your-own-tone paragraph:

People turned to stare. A man took off his hat and nodded right at her, through the glass. A woman stood at a garden wall with her children lined up in a row, and they each made the sign of the cross as the cars crawled past. In the centre of Tullamore, shopkeepers stood in front of half-shuttered windows, pedestrians blessed themselves and, when she looked behind, Carmel saw these people step down off the kerb to follow the cortège, like zombies.
That is what she said later to Aedemar Grant, it was Night of the Living Dead Culchie.

Then some joyless satire about the hypocrisy of public mourning ceremonies:

When they took their place at the top of the church, there was a man in military uniform in the other front pew; absurdly handsome and looped at the shoulder with fancy braid. The president of Ireland had sent him, apparently.
He came over to shake their hands and to give a smart, heart-turning salute, and Carmel wanted to ask him if he thought Phil was any good, as a poet. Because no one her age thought he was any good, he was just an example of something. Also, this whole scene was an example of something. There were a few women in headscarves and about 400 middle-aged men, many of whom had started enjoying themselves right there in the church.

That final sentence is probably a ‘comic’ invocation of the idea that the rural Irish are a mob of drunks.

I haven’t read anything else by Anne Enright*. On the strength of this book I’m unlikely to.

The meeting: In this Book Club, we discuss two books, possibly because if we just choose one it could turn out to be a dud. The Wren, the Wren was paired with My Friends by Hisham Matar. Both books start out with the notion that it’s impossible to know what’s going on in another person’s head. Both have a lot to do with fathers, and – as someone pointed out at the club meeting – both have protagonists who are lost.

No one told me I was completely wrong about The Wren, The Wren. There was general agreement that Carmel was more interesting than Nell, and no one cared for the book as a whole. We were all bemused by the praise heap[ed on it elsewhere, including its being included on the long list for the Booker. Two people had heard Anne Enright talk at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week. Evidently she was delightful, speaking a lot about the importance of poets and family in Irish society and not that much about the book. A friend of one of us had said it was a wonderful book: we surmised that this was because of its portrayal of coercive control – which I at least thought was as ordinary as Phil’s poetry.

My Friends is a much more interesting book and generated much more interesting conversation. I’ll write about it separately.

* Or so I thought. A couple of hours after pressing ‘Publish’, I discovered that I read The Green Road only a year ago, and to judge by my blog post (here) I loved it.

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