Books read on the road

I recently went on a ten-day road trip to the Mungo National Park by way of a number of country towns. Knowing there’d be plenty of time to read, I packed poetry. The slim volumes didn’t take up much space, but they were guaranteed to provide plenty of nourishment.

Here are the three books I read, in order of publication. As you’ll see, they don’t have a lot in common.

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Oscar Schwartz, The Honeymoon Stage (Giramondo 2017)

In a talk in May 2015 at TEDxYouth@Sydney Oscar Schwartz asked, ‘Can a Computer write Poetry?’ It’s an interesting talk that makes me feel as if I belong to a past era.

I wonder if some of the poems in The Honeymoon Stage are computer generated, challenging readers to guess which are and which are not, as in the game Schwartz discusses in the talk, ‘Bot or Not’. Probably not: they mostly cohere, and have a discernible narrative or line of argument that doesn’t seem (yet) to be within the skill set of computer poem-generators.

Mostly the poems have a surrealist edge, as in ‘i sat on lungs’, in which the narrator realises that the chair he is sitting on is actually a pair of lungs, or ‘what side of the bed does your clone sleep on?’, whose title is almost enough. There are a couple of long poems. ‘how to write an ebook of poetry’ starts out as a deadpan account of the process, but takes a turn at about the two-thirds mark:

die

get buried

decompose

become diffuse among various organic materials
on earth

be there as a collection of diffuse organic materials
when humanity ends

The other long poem, ‘should i watch game of thrones?’ similarly starts with a list of reasonable pros and cons then goes off on fantasy tangents.

The poems are universally light, witty, even quirky, and largely – to my aged mind – inconsequential. The book was a pleasant travel read.

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Gerald Murnane, Green Shadows and other poems (Giramondo 2019)

In 2018 the New York Times Magazine ran a headline about Gerald Murnane, ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?‘ He’s a giant of Australian letters – a giant who has been largely unknown to me. I may have attempted one of his novels, The Plains, and given up on it. Recently I read his Collected Short Fiction, which I loved.

Though Murnane began his writing career as a poet, as far as I know none of his early poems have been collected. All of those in Green Shadows, his first book of poetry and possibly his last book ever, were written in his late 70s.

The poems are shot through with a curmudgeonly iconoclasm. ‘Crap-books’, for example, begins:

Here's a list of some of the crap-
books that I forced myself to read
when I was still a nervous young chap
who supposed that every overseas

writer knew more than I. I'll start
with Anna Karenina – utterly unreadable.

In ‘Political Philosophy’, he puts the case against progressive activism. In ‘Non-travelling’, he disparages knowledge acquired by travel as:

bes with my a___skin++__g the countless trashy
recollections of barely known people and places

Along with the curmudgeonliness, though, there’s an unapologetic and unsparing self-portrait of a man who, if he had belonged to a later generation, might be telling the world about his diagnosis of autism. There are awkward encounters with women, childhood recollections, odes to Victorian districts, reflections on his earlier writings, especially his early plans as a poet, some short poems in Hungarian with English translations. He pays homage to Marcel Proust, Henry Handel Richardson, William Carlos Williams, Lesbia Harford and John Clare among others.

I confess that on first reading I didn’t engage much. The book felt like a doodling PS to a long career, a collection of extras for fans of the novels. But the poems grew on me in subsequent readings.

What prompted me to go back for subsequent readings was ‘A Cistercian life’, which sadly is too long to quote in full here. It begins with the young Murnane reading Thomas Merton’s Elected Silence, and being attracted to the austere contemplative life that book describes. It tells of Murnane’s later discovery that Merton was ‘full of himself’, hardly ever observing the Cistercian rule; and his further disillusion when his son, after spending a week at a Cistercian monastery, reports that the monks, ‘once famed for their silence’, pumped their guest for information about TV shows, no longer did manual labour, and went on annual holidays. The poem’s last three stanzas describe the spartan conditions of Murnane’s current life: no radio, TV, telephone, or computer, the bare minimum of furniture. The poem ends:

I've made no vow of silence but I haven't
spoken since yesterday when I called at the store.

I last took a holiday back in the nineteen-seventies,
for my young sons' sake. Through my only window I see
mostly wall, but the view from each end of my street
is of countryside, level and seemingly empty.

How you read a poem depends on what you bring to it, and I brought a lot to this one. I too was enchanted by Thomas Merton as a teenager, and briefly tried to do the contemplative thing. My mother’s beloved youngest sister joined the Carmelites, an order of nuns with similar rules to the Cistercians, and I treasure letters she wrote to me. One of my old Catholic teachers, a lovely man, now lives in a yurt in the middle of a cow paddock and sees as few people as possible, spending most of his time in silence. I don’t aspire to such a life, but I respect it as a spiritual discipline. With these lines, I saw Murnane’s portrayal of himself in a different light, not so much a contrarian curmudgeon as a self-deprecating man of discipline. The force of those final words was amplified by the circumstances I read them in: I was staying in the Shearers’ Quarters at Lake Mungo, where the landscape could hardly be more level or more seemingly empty, yet so rich with profound meaning.

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Eunice Andrada, TAKE CARE: New Poems (Giramondo 2021)

In my blog post about Eunice Andrada’s first book, Flood Damages (Giramondo 2018), I began, ‘There’s a lot of pain in these poems.’ I can say the same about the this book, which incidentally has been shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize and the Kenneth Slessor Prize in the 2022 Nsw Premier’s Literary Awards.

Central to the book is ‘Comfort Sequence’, in which there is little comfort. It begins with a prose poem that starts, ‘Another statue dedicated to ‘comfort women’ who were enslaved and raped in wartime has been removed in the Philippines.’ Much of the text on this page is obscured/replaced by white space in the shape of such a statue. The sequence sets out to counter that erasure, coming at it from many angles – dissection of pertinent language, conversations with a woman who was there, aphorisms, paraphrases of Filipino news sources – culminating in a horrific vision of rape culture:

A rapist teaches me how to drive.
A rapist decides what I do with my body
after rape. A rapist on trial doesn't believe
he's a rapist. A rapist doesn't like being called
a rapist. A rapist raping doesn't believe in rape,
its perversion of simpler ideas like cold seedless
grapes, eggs ripe for hatching, nape of beast
for slaughter. A rapist tells me to be careful
of what I say.

From one point of view, this sequence is balanced by ‘Vengeance Sequence’. Here’s one of its 15 short poems:

Filipino women stop working.
Empires shut down in a tantrum,
refusing to care for themselves.
We do not go back to work.

In Andrada’s poetry, rape is situated as intimately bound up with racism, militarism, nationalism, colonialism and other forms of exploitation. As this little poem exemplifies, resistance/vengeance can be cheerful, life-affirming and solidaristic.

The book’s title, TAKE CARE (the shouting capitals are part of it), refers to the Tagalog word ingat. In the poem, ‘Take Care’ (which doesn’t share the shouting capitals), the speaker wakes from night terrors in Jerusalem, and is befriended by some Filipina women the next day. They have dinner together, and the end of the evening sees ‘the night’s dispersal marked by chimes / of ingat’:

of machinery. They tell me to ingat
with the men, the checkpoints, the soldiers.

Take care, take care, take care.

In my temporary room, I let myself rest,
believing I could be safe.

Solidarity with other women, particularly Filipina women, is a place of possible safety. By implication, the book, calling out ingat / take care to its readers, is offering something of the kind in a world whose danger and injustice it does not shrink from.

Andrada is a fine performer of her own poetry. Giramondo has uploaded this video of her reading ‘Kundiman’, a very short poem that beautifully positions her writing in relation to the world of warfare and extraction:

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I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for complimentary copies of all three books.