Steve Armstrong, What’s Left

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.

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.