Category Archives: Books

Robert Creeley 1950–1965 (and Sonnet #12)

Posted on 27 November 2012 | 2 comments

Robert Creeley, Poems 1950–1965 (Marion Boyars 1967)

First things first: If you’re a student looking for help with an essay or if you love Robert Creeley’s poetry and are looking for a like-minded spirit, stop, turn back, you are going the wrong way. I don’t pretend to have anything sensible to say. This is largely a blog post about my ignorance.

Robert Creeley is held in very high esteem by them that know about these things. I think he might be a poet’s poet. A quick google produces a number of learned and instructive articles, in which I learned much, including that this UK publication seems to be Creeley’s first US trade book, For Love, plus an extra five years worth of poems. Creeley makes a commanding appearance in Ron Mann’s 1982 movie Poetry in Motion. Robert Adamson lectured about him recently, and evidently he was a major influence on a generation of Australian poets. I know all this, because as I made my way through this book I felt at a loss, and was casting around for guidance. Sadly, asking for guidance on how to read a poet is like asking to have a joke explained. I could kind of see what people were saying but I was like the person who sort of understands the explanation but still doesn’t laugh at the joke.

I found a lot of mentions of Charles Olson (another gap in my general education), and when I looked Olson up on Wikipedia I found:

Olson called for a poetic meter [Wikipedia uses US spelling] based on the poet’s breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic.

Ah, I was doing it wrong. I had to stop needing conventional syntax and use my ears more. In an excellent article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Burt says:

Creeley’s quiet poems demand that we read them slowly, even when they appear brief and simple. Taken too fast, or too many at a time, his poems … can sound cramped, monotonous and repetitive. Read at leisure, the best poems are subtle, musically gifted, memorably terse.

I had been finding the poems cramped, monotonous and repetitive, so clearly I was doing it wrong, again. I slowed right down, and read just a couple of poems at a time. That’s not to say I slavishly submitted my faculties to Burt. He describes ‘The Crisis’ as horrifying, and quotes its opening lines:

Let me say (in anger) that since the day we were married
we have never had a towel
where anyone could find it,
the fact.

Now this was one of the few poems that had actually spoken to me at the time I read Burt’s article, and I wasn’t horrified. Maybe it was possible to write those lines without self-mockery in the 1950s, but I read them as obviously ironic, an oblique apology from the poet for losing his temper.

Then there’s a Paris Review interview published in 1968, just a couple of years after this book:

INTERVIEWER: How long does the writing of a poem take for you?
CREELEY: For me, it’s literally the time it takes to type or otherwise write it – because I do work in this fashion of simply sitting down and writing, usually without any process of revision. So that if it goes – or, rather, comes – in an opening way, it continues until it closes, and that’s usually when I stop. […] I’ll come into the room and sit and begin working simply because I feel like it. I’ll start writing and fooling around, like they say, and something will start to cohere; I’ll begin following it as it occurs. It may lead to its own conclusion, complete its own entity.[…] Of course, I have no idea how much time it takes to write a poem in the sense of how much time it takes to accumulate the possibilities of which the poem is the articulation.

Another way I’d been doing it wrong! No wonder I was floundering. I tend to read poems as if they’re carefully wrought, deeply considered utterances, but according to the man himself his are something quite different, something much more risky and of the moment. I took this with a grain of salt, but I did take it.

I can’t say I’d come to love Creeley’s poetry in general by the end of the book. But it kept me reading to the end. Round about 1960, either he or I had a turning point, and I was enjoying a lot. Look at ‘Love Comes Quietly’:

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.

With this poem, I no longer felt that I was reading this collection because it was good for me. Creeley here seems to have a moment’s respite from the intense, punishing self-consciousness that characterises the poetry generally. But if something was different in the poetry, something had changed in me too. Suddenly I could hear the music: ‘quietly’ ‘finally’ ‘about me’ ‘on me’ / ‘know’ ‘go’ ‘alone’ / ‘old ways’ ‘alone all the way’. Such short lines and so much happening in the sound of them – as well as in the sense. Any number of other poems were singing to me from then on.

A handful of longer poems towards the end of the collection are just marvellous: ‘The World’, about a lover’s grief; ‘The Women’, an amazing attempt to articulate feelings about sex and the object of sexual desire; ‘Anger’, about anger;  ‘Something’, which starts – unpromisingly you might think – with a lover’s embarrassment at having a pee in his presence.

My warning at the start of this blog entry still stands, and I especially don’t get what’s going on in some of the poems with very short lines. But I’m glad to have made this poet’s acquaintance.

And now, because it’s November, a sonnet of sorts. This is not a parody of Creeley – in my wildest dreams I couldn’t bring off  his way with rhyme, so I’ve stuck to my usual rhyme scheme. But there are some quotations, and because his lines are characteristically very short, I’ve cut mine down:

Sonnet 12: Evening
I speak, I
think I think
it asks my-
self to drink.
Position is where you
put it. I care too
little, I smoke
no joke,
therefore I am not
in attitude perplexing
a man so vexing
to flex or rot.
Woman so addressed
is easily depressed.

2 Comments

Posted in Books, LoSoRhyMo

Tagged , , , ,

Ross Gibson’s 26 Views and my 14 lines (Sonnet #9)

Posted on 21 November 2012 | 13 comments

Ross Gibson, 26 Views of the Starburst World (UWAP 2012)

My formal education left me with a lingering sense that Australian history was boring: a drab procession of convicts, explorers, squatters, gold miners, politicians arguing about free trade and train gauges, soldiers, shearers, horsemen – and somewhere on the sidelines an undifferentiated, disappearing mass labelled ‘Aborigines’.

I began to see things differently in the theatre in the early 70s, with the irreverence and vigour of plays like The Legend of King O’Malley (Ellis and Boddy 1970), The Duke of Edinburgh Assassinated (Ellis and Hall 1972) and Flash Jim Vaux (Blair, Clark and Colman 1972), and exhumed splendours like Edward Geoghegan’s The Currency Lass (from the 1840s, published by Currency Press in 1976) and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Brumby Innes (written 1927, first professional production at the Pram Factory in 1972). Skipping forward a couple of decades, Inga Clendinnen’s brilliant Dancing with Strangers (the link is to Will Owen’s review), by taking a probing scalpel to journal accounts of the first years of the settlement at Port Jackson, made me realise what an extraordinary moment that was, whose meaning is still a long way from being fully understood.

Ross Gibson’s 26 Views of the Starburst World is even more of a revelation, and has an even tighter focus than Dancing with Strangers. It looks at two notebooks, ninety pages in all, in which William Dawes recorded his notes on the ‘language of N. S. Wales, in the neighbourhood of Sydney (Native and English)’ in the late 18th century.

William Dawes was a marine lieutenant and astronomer who lived in Sydney from 1788 to 1791, years in which the world of the Eora changed catastrophically and in which that of the British invader–settlers likewise was transformed. These two notebooks were rediscovered in London in 1972. In compiling them, Dawes drew on his relationships with a small group of Eora, including most memorably a young woman named Patyegarang, who visited him at his tiny observatory on the edge of the settlement. They record snippets of conversation, and give sometimes enigmatic glimpses of tiny interactions.

Gibson describes the notebooks as ‘fragmented, unfinished, heuristic’, with ‘a prismatic quality’. And his book might be described in similar terms: it quotes, questions, analyses, peers closely at faint marks, speculates, extrapolates. It comes at the notebooks from, well, at least 26 angles: there’s biography, linguistics , psychology, anthropology, the history of colonisation, the history of science (1788 was a time of a high romantic approach to scientific enquiry in England), communication theory, the politics of Rugby League in 21st century Sydney. Apart from Dawes’ contemporaries Watkin Tench, David Collins and Arthur Phillip, it quotes Wordsworth, Emerson, Walden, Mallarmé, James Agee, Kenneth Slessor, the 2oth century haiku master Seichi, Robert Gray, Barry Hill – all of them pertinently … And sometimes it lets the notebooks speak for themselves. Gibson describes his approach as ’roundabout, relational, a tad restless and unruly’, and in a slightly less alliterative moment as ‘a little like history, a little like poetry, a little maddeningly like a séance’.

Possibly my favourite moment in the book is the facsimile of page 37 of Notebook A, on which there are just four words:

Yánga
________Present
––––________I
___________thou

Gibson gives us a caption – and bear in mind that everywhere else he refrains from speculation about any sexual dimension to the relationship between Dawes and Patyegarang:

‘Yanga’ – a verb that Dawes records but does not translate. Other colonial word lists, not compiled by Dawes, suggest ‘yanga’ means ‘to copulate’.

The School of Oriental and African Studies (London) has put the complete notebooks are online, with transcriptions of their contents, at http://www.williamdawes.org/.

But I’m falling behind on my quota of November sonnets, so here goes:

Sonnet 9: William Dawes and Patyegarang
He lived apart to study stars
and drew dark students to his table –
students and ambassadors
who drank his tea so he was able
to write their words down, turn their breath
to marks on paper. War and death
were soon to dominate this story
but then there was a kind of glory:
‘Paouwagadyımíŋa,’
she said, ‘You shade me from the sun.’
She said, ‘We’re angry, fear the gun –
Gulara, tyérun gu̇nın.’
The future loomed with genocide:
these marks show some opposed that tide.

13 Comments

Posted in Books, LoSoRhyMo

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Book Group climbs Venero Armanno’s Black Mountain, plus sonnet #4

Posted on 8 November 2012 | Leave a comment

Venero Armanno, Black Mountain (UQP 2012)

Before the Book Group meeting:
A hasty read of this book’s cover blurb led me to expect a kind of fictionalised misery memoir cum migration tale, a book where a second or third generation Australian explores his European heritage:

Beginning in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago … Based on factual events … Italy … rural fringes of coastal Australia … a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.

There are elements of misery memoir: in the most powerful and memorable part of the book the main character, Cesare Montenero, is sold as a child into virtual slavery to work in Sicily’s sulphur mines in the early 20th century. But Cesare’s story is told in the literary equivalent of found footage, and the sulphur mines account for only 40 of the 200 or so pages of the found manuscript. A 30-page prologue has already set some creepy, horror-genre expectations, so that one’s antennae are out for hints of the darker, weirder underlying story. It’s hard to say much more without giving stuff away, but there are plenty of pleasing twists and turns. I’m glad I didn’t read any reviews beforehand, as one of the book’s pleasures is in the way appearances turn out to be deceptive, the ground shifts constantly under your feet, you can’t really be sure what kind of book you’re reading.

I enjoyed it, but can’t say I found it satisfactory. Too often I became aware of the plot mechanics, that someone was making it all up. A gauge of my lack of engagement is that I kept wanting to have a conversation with the copy editor: ‘If we’re going to opt for the US practicing,’ I wanted to ask her/him, ‘why not consistently use US spelling, like sulfur?’ Or, ‘Are sure you shouldn’t have queried whether resiled to should have been resigned to?’ There are more such moments, and the fact that I noticed them may say more about me than the book, but it does indicate I was less than fully engrossed.

After the meeting:
This was an unusual meeting. The group had been going for exactly 10 years last night, so there was much taking stock and reminiscing, and passing on of lore to those of us, like me, who weren’t there at the start. But our in-house facilitator made sure we each had a moment to give our personal take on this book, and uncharacteristically a consensus emerged: the book was OK, no one hated it, but all but one of us found it fairly ho-hum. The sulphur mine section got a general thumbs up – one chap had read the book a while ago and had trouble remembering anything else about it. And, as someone said, we enjoyed the brothels of Paris. But, while I think we all read to the end, the overarching plot failed to impress. Most of us didn’t feel the sulphur mines and the brothels to be integrated, so when those parts came to an end, the wheels of the plot had to start from a virtual standstill. The one person who had a different reading argued for a deep thematic coherence, but I won’t say more because it really is a book that can be spoiled by too much being given away.

And the obligatory sonnet:

Sonnet 4:
Ten years and more than 60 books
discussed by us (and mostly read) –
by builders, architects, home cooks
and sundry ageing chaps, well fed
each time in mind and body. Park,
Malouf, McEwan, Stead, Houellebecq,
Coetzee (twice), White, Ghosh (a naval
title), Falconer, Miéville:
We all loved Tolstoy. Tsiolkas split us.
Tonight: Armanno, reminiscence,
but mostly – here’s the Book Group’s essence –
not so much a tute on lit as
time for sharing – hip, hooray-able –
lives and minds around a table.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Group, Books, LoSoRhyMo

Tagged ,

NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2012

Posted on 5 November 2012 | 3 comments

The shortlists for the NSW Premier’s Literary and History Awards were announced today, and the awards dinner will be on 30 November. I’ve been a fan of these awards for years, but this year it’s personal. My fabulous niece, Edwina Shaw, is in incredibly distinguished company on the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, for her novel Thrill Seekers. Much snoopy dancing and weeping for joy has ensued.

I couldn’t find the lists on the site of the State Library, which is administering the awards this year. The Sydney Morning Herald has them, here.

Apart from Edwina’s book, I’ve read two of the novels (blog posts here and here) and one of the non-fiction works (here), all with my book group. I’ve read one of the multicultural titles (here), and none of the poetry books, the children’s books or the ‘young people’s literature’. I’ve seen two of the three scripts (episodes of Rake and East West 101) and have no desire to see the third (Snowtown).

The Premier’s History Awards usually happen at a different time of year, but because of a general overhaul (not, Barry be thanked, a cancellation as in Queensland), the two lots of awards are happening at the same time for just this year. I haven’t read anything on the History Awards shortlists, though I do have one book beside the bed.

Added on 6 November: The shortlists are now up on the State Library web site, here and here. There are instructions there for how to vote in the People’s Choice Award.

3 Comments

Posted in Books, Vicarious vainglory

Tagged , ,

Southerly 72/1

Posted on 25 October 2012 | 3 comments

Elizabeth McMahon and David Brooks (editors), Southerly Vol 72 No 1 2012: Mid-century Women Writers

20121018-203833.jpg

Spring is here – ‘a box where sweets compacted lie’ as George Herbert called it, in a phrase that could apply just as well to this issue of Southerly. (Or to put it prosaically, this post is an annotated list.)

There’s a new Jennifer Maiden poem, ‘George Jeffreys 13: George Jeffreys woke up in Beijing’. This series of poems has had to find a new focus now that George W Bush is no longer reliably on the television obsessing about Iraq as he was for the first poems. George and his kind of girlfriend Clare seem to be travelling the world, waking up in one troubled locale after another, having adventures involving guns, fires and pirate ships as well as discussing politics, morality, philosophy etc. It’s not a verse novel, or even a discontinuous narrative really, but it is never uninteresting. In this poem George and Clare meet with a recently released Chinese dissident in the Forbidden City where they are joined by Confucius and the Duke of Zhou.

There’s Fiona Morrison’s excellent essay, ‘Leaving the Party: Dorothy Hewett, literary politics and the long 1960s’. Like many Communists, Hewett stayed in the Party after the 1956 invasion of Hungary despite serious misgivings, then left when the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. In effect this essay traces the movement of her mind between those two events as revealed in her writing. Strikingly though, it doesn’t refer to either Hungary or Czechoslovakia, restricting itself to literary matters. Some of the essay’s specialist scholarly language took my fancy, and revived my love of double dactyls:

Higamun hogamun,
Fíona Morrison,
writing in Southerly,
gathers no moss:
says that our Dorothy
ex-Marxist-Leninist
wrote a sustained tropo-
logics of loss.

There’s Karen Lamb’s ‘“Yrs Patrick”: Thea Astley’s brush with timely advice on “the rackety career of novel writing”’, an inside look at the relationship between Astley and other writers, with a focus on a particularly unsparing letter from Patrick White. I once heard Astley quote a dollop of writerly advice she had received from White: ‘If you’re going to write about a shit, Thea, you have to make him a really big shit.’ This article is fascinating but doesn’t include anything quite that colourful. Karen Lamb is writing a biography of Astley. Reading her account of Astley’s approach to friendship, I wondered if biographers don’t run the risk of coming to dislike their subjects through knowing too much:

Karen Lamb
surely doesn't mean to slam
Thea Astley
but she makes her seem ghastly.

I’ll refrain from doggerel for the rest of this post.

There’s the other piece I turned to the day the journal arrived in the mail, David Musgrave’s review of Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray’s Australian Poetry Since 1788. In a measured and judicious manner, Musgrave joins the line of anthologists, poets and publishers who give this anthology the thumbs down. (Incidentally, I note that neither David Brooks, Southerly‘s co-editor, nor Kate Lilley, its poetry editor, got a guernsey in the anthology, but that didn’t stop them from including an elegant narrative poem by Gray elsewhere in this issue.)

Of the theme essays on mid-century women writers, other than the two I’ve already mentioned, Helen O’Reilly’s ‘“Dazzling” Dark – Lantana Lane (1959)’ and Susan Sheridan’s ‘“Cranford at Moreton Bay”: Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant‘ persuaded me to add the books they discuss to my To Be Read pile. I skimmed the essays on Christina Stead, Eve Langley and Elizabeth Harrower, and a second one on Jessica Anderson, which are intended for specialist readers. I mean no irony when I say I was grateful to read this near the start of an essay: ‘In her well-known formulation of performativity, Judith Butler argues that repetition of a discourse actually produces the phenomena that it seeks to control.’ Such sentences serve as warnings: what follows is intended not just for readers who can understand the warning sentence, but readers to whom its contents are familiar.

Off theme, there’s Ed Scheer’s ‘“Non-places for non-people”: Social sculpture in Minto’, an account of a performance art event, Big Pinko, in which two artists painted a house pink. It sounds like an interesting project, but I found article a little disturbing in the way it talked about the people of Minto. Perhaps the Judith Butler formulation is relevant: the phrase ‘non-places for non-people’ is meant to encapsulate a criticism of the dysfunctional environment in this outer western suburb, but as it is repeated in this essay it comes to read like a dismissal of the people who live there. The essay has a lot in it that’s beautiful and evocative, but in this respect it makes me appreciate all over again Michael Mohammed Ahmad at Westside’s labours to foster writers in Western Sydney.

This issue has abundant rich poetry. I love B. R. Dionysius’ ‘Ghouls’, a set of five sonnets about the Brisbane floods.

The white festiva shunted like a tinny, half-tonne maggot into
O'Hanlon Street's winter bulb cul-de-sac. The Bremer's brown
Muzzle investigated the bottom stairs of a corner house, sniffing
For the scent of past flood levels left by more malicious beasts.

Of the other poems, I particular liked ‘Rose Bay Airport, 1944’ and ‘Standing Soldiers’ by Margaret Bradstock (both after Russell Drysdale wartime paintings), ‘Holiday snap’ by Andrew Taylor, ‘Hardware 1953’ by Geoff Page, and ‘The Roadside Bramble’ by Peter Minter.

Of the fifty pages of reviews, John Kinsella on David Brooks’s The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry and Pam Brown on Kate Lilley’s Ladylike stood out for me, Kinsella for fascinating rumination on the nature of literary hoaxes, and Brown for her usual generous intelligence.

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Southerly 71/3

Posted on 18 October 2012 | 2 comments

David Brooks and Elizabeth McMahon (editors), Southerly Vol 71 No 3 2011: A Nest of Bunyips

In 2001 the National Library of Australia published Bunyips: Australia’s Folklore of Fear by Robert Holden and Nicholas Holden. Robert said in his introduction that writing and editing the book had taken him ‘down many byways of history, literature, folklore, superstition and cultural studies’, and that he had gleaned insights from palaeontology, evolutionary thinking and anthropology.

The title of this issue of Southerly might lead you to expect something along the same lines. You would be misled. It does include a scattering of atmospheric drawings dating from between 1890 and 1912, citing the Holdens’ book as the immediate source, but they are the only bunyips on offer. As David Brooks says in his editorial, the issue is filled with things from the backlog ‘of pieces too good to reject but refusing any easy categorisation, and the bunyip motif derives from Michael Sharkey’s long poem, ‘Where the Bunyip Builds it Nest’, chosen more or less at random from the pile. (The poem isn’t actually about bunyips, but it is a bit of a monster: a long poem in five parts made up of lines taken from other poems from settlement until now in roughly chronological order, all carefully annotated.)

On reflection, Brooks says, bunyips – nocturnal, haunters of waterholes, ‘strange hybrids whose shrill quarrellings can sometimes be heard late into the night’ – sound like some poets. So the motif gained legitimacy: the issue contains work by 28 poets, essays on and by a half dozen more, and reviews of seven books of poetry. And the online supplement, the Long Paddock, has almost as much again, plus a substantial interview with Laurie Duggan.

The riches on offer include:

  • Jennifer Maiden’s ‘The Pearl Roundabout’, in which the re-awakened Elanor Roosevelt continues the conversations with Hillary Clinton begun in the book Pirate Rain
  • Margaret Bradstock’s pre-elegiac ‘Ask not’
  • Julie Maclean’s ‘cassowary’, a North Queensland poem that compresses an awful lot into a small space, about colonisation, tourism, art, and of course the gorgeous, dangerous cassowary
  • Peter Kirkpatrick’s delightfully old-fashioned, even archaic ‘The Angels in the House’, a meditation on inner city housing in heroic couplets
  • two poems by Craig Powell: a sonnet named from a line from Seamus Heaney, “and catch the heart off guard”, and a reinterpretation of an anecdote from Freud, ‘Fort Da’ (Craig Powell also reviews Toby Davidson’s edition of Collected Poems by Francis Webb, seizing the occasion to share some poignant memories of Webb).

Southerly is a refereed scholarly journal, and I tend to skip the scholarly articles, or at least the ones about writers I am unlikely to read, and those with Deleuze, Kristeva etc in the title. I did read Kevin Hart’s ‘Susannah Without the Cherub’, a fascinating discussion of A D Hope’s ‘The Double Looking Glass’. It may be, as Martin Johnston said, that A D Hope sent away for a Great Poet Kit, and then successfully used it to become a great poet. This essay bears out the second part of Martin’s quip.

It’s not all poetry. There are four short stories, all of which I enjoyed – Matthia Dempsey’s ‘One Week Gone’, about an old man a week after his wife’s death, is superb.

No bunyips, not really, but that’s not a terrible loss, given what’s there instead.

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rhyll McMaster goes late night shopping (with washed money?)

Posted on 16 October 2012 | 3 comments

Rhyll McMaster, Late Night Shopping (Brandl & Schlesinger 2012)
—, Washing the Money (Angus & Robertson 1986)

At Sappho’s recently, Kate Lilley said she had always enjoyed the work of the poet whose book she was launching but had never previously had to speak to that enjoyment, a very different and challenging  thing. I sympathise. I enjoyed Late Night Shopping – a lot – but don’t know that I’m up to giving an account of my enjoyment. As often happens to me when I contemplate writing about poetry – any poetry from ‘My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose’ to, I dunno, Christopher Brennan’s translations of Mallarmé – I feel a bit lost for words.  If you want a proper review of Late Night Shopping, I recommend Lyndon Walker in the Rochford Street Review. But here’s my two bobs’ worth.

‘The Shell’, the first poem in the book, confronts us with the fresh corpse of a woman who has died in hospital:

After that rasping sound when the woman died
she was bleached pale on the surface like a sponge.

The poem foreshadows the main subject of the collection: not so much death as the relationship between physical reality and the reality of the mind; ‘The mind [is] embodied and embrained’; ‘A sheep’s skull is a sculpted housing / fine and hard for a sheep’s brain, / built to retain its idea of itself’; or this, from ‘The Image of the Box’:

All philosophy's a game,
It's a clever fox
That stops us thinking

of the universe
as void condensed,
a roaring silent trinket

of energy rampant

It’s not nihilism or morbidity, but a kind of cool, radical wondering. On the one hand there’s the physical universe, including us, and on the other there’s what we make of it all. Rejecting illusion, perhaps, but still enchanted. The lines from ‘Nomenclature’, ‘Call the unknowable / what you will / from your dug-in position / on the side of a hill,’ could be read as advocating intellectual despair, but that hill, coming at the end of a poem full of abstractions, feels to me like a promise.

A number of poems are responses to images – a photograph, nine paintings by Sidney Nolan, five drawings by Terry Milligan. It seems to me that the surreal Nolan sequence, ‘Evolutionary History of Edward Kelly in Primary Colours’ needs to be read beside the paintings it refers to. As a public service, then, here are the Nolan paintings that I could identify from the notes on the poems, with the name of the poems that refer to each of them (I’ve struggled with the formatting here. I hope it looks the same in your browser as it does in mine):

  • Kelly and Horse, 1945: ‘Final Classification’
  • Return to Glenrowan 1946: ‘Extinction Imminent’
  • Glenrowan, 1945: ‘Fossil Record’
  • Kelly, 1946: ‘Mesozoic Territory’
  • Policeman in Wombat Hole, 1946: ‘Mesozoic Territory’
  • Kelly in Bush, 1945
  • Kelly and Horse, 1946: ‘The Creature’s Morphology’
  • Kelly and Sergeant Kennedy, 1945: ‘Most Mutations Fail’

)

The day I finished reading Late Night Shopping for the first time, I found a copy of Rhyll McMaster’s Washing the Money, published 26 years earlier, in a secondhand bookshelf (the aforementioned Sappho’s, as it happens). Self-described as ‘Poems with Photographs’, this is full of verbal snapshots of the poet’s early life and her life as a young mother. These poems give us the remembered world of a 1950s childhood in precise detail – a ‘narrow crack at finger-running height’ in a brick wall, a newspaper delivered ‘with a stuffed thud’, ‘grandma’s hair like silkworm thread’. There are actual photos, and some of the poems are responses to them; other poems refer to photos not included.

This book spoke to me in a very personal way: Rhyll McMaster and I were both born in Queensland in 1947, so when she uses words like ‘port’ and ‘togs’ I’m there. The family car, the beach excursions, the mosquito nets are all home territory for me. My father didn’t wash and iron the family’s money at weekends, but the description of the notes strikes a chord. (Incidentally, the poem ‘Washing the Money’, which documents a weird family ritual to comic effect, becomes a rich and deep reflection on family connections when read, as it was by me, with the recent book’s elegiac ‘His Ordered World’ fresh in the mind.)

My biggest pleasure from this book, though, was a piece of uncanny serendipity. Among the photographs is a 1939 studio portrait of the poet’s mother, Jean Isobel. Here it is, and next to it is a studio portrait of my own mother, Esme Isabel, taken a few years earlier. It’s not the first time I’ve felt that a writer knew something very private about me, but I don’t know that any other book has ever come this close:

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , ,

The Apology, conclusion

Posted on 15 October 2012 | 2 comments

At last we reach the end: it was a 43 minute press conference (click here for video) and a 23 stanza, 184 line poem (click for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

He ends with some denials. ‘I’ve never ever
called a person bitch. It’s not my lingo
(I just read out letters). And I’ve never
likewise called her liar. It’s a thing, though,
the way she promises no tax forever,
she says East Timor, then Malaysia. Ringo
changed his tune less often. Fuel watch!
Liar’s an awful word, but she’s a botch.

‘I didn’t say that women are destroying
the joint – I know it’s on the tape like that,
but I meant just some women. It’s annoying:
I defend them, fund them, I go in to bat
for women ‘cos they don’t waste time enjoying
red wine and cigars at lunch. My hat
is tipped to tough ones who excel in arts.
I don’t despise their gender, just some parts.

‘I’m here to face the music, clear the air
in person, not on paper. Them that flogs
their products on my show will see I’m fair.
I thank you all for coming. Go the Dogs!’

Go, not so little poem, to Lord knows where,
but first to readers’ eyes by way of blogs.
It’s Jones who speaks in almost every line:
The words that do not please are surely mine.

Finis!

2 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged ,

Asia Literary Review 24

Posted on 14 October 2012 | 3 comments

Martin Alexander (editor) Asia Literary Review 24, [Northern] Summer 2012

[Added in 2021: Most of the links in the blog post are broken, but the title above and the image to the left will get you there. The whole issue is available online to subscribers.]

I subscribed to the Asia Literary Review in 2009 for worthy motives: they had published a short story by my niece Edwina Shaw, and I wanted to support a publication that had faith in her; it also seemed a relatively painless way to ensure some cultural diversity in my reading. I’ve kept on renewing my subscription because every issue has something to delight – from a photo essay on Karen exiles living on the Thai–Burmese border to a splendidly simple pasta sauce recipe. The current issue doesn’t disappoint.

Martin Alexander’s editorial announces that this journal is organised around the theme of identity. The contributors, he writes,

reflect, and reflect upon, the multiplicity and complexity of their identities. Each piece was composed in isolation, but when brought and bound together their explorations of identity complement one another in unanticipated and intriguing ways.

I would add: in laugh out loud ways, and weird ways, and ways that make you want to weep. Many of the pieces are about dislocation – through migration, exile or invasion. Many are about the experience of being mixed-heritage. There’s a fascinating, kaleidoscopic effect as voices from China, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Japan, India, Thailand, South Korea, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the UK, the USA and Australia, Uyghur, Hawai’ian and Burmese voices, echo one another’s motifs, answer one another’s questions and question one another’s answers.

My precious blogging time is being taken up with doggerel endeavours these days, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning, pretty much at random, just a few highlights.

Kavita Bhanot’s ‘Too Asian, Not Asian Enough‘ asks if it isn’t a new form of Orientalism for so-called British Asians to simplify their identities and perform them rather than striving to understand and reveal their own complexities. The journal’s imprint page reveals that Madhvi Ramani’s short story ‘Windows‘ is taken from an anthology edited by Kavita Bhanot with the same name as her article. Ramani’s story illustrates beautifully the kind of thing Bhanot is advocating: it starts out with Mrs Sharma, close to the stereotype of the elderly, widowed Indian living in Britain, locked out of her home, and ends in a completely unexpected place.

In Win Lyovarin’s Rainbow Days, the Bangkok Reds and Yellows demonstrations are seen, to wonderful satirical effect, from the point of view of a barely legal Burmese street merchant. This is one of a number of pieces translated into English, in this case from Thai by Marcel Barang. Kim Jae Young’s ‘Elephant‘, translated from Korean by Moon-ok Lee and Nicholas Yohan Duvernay, is another: an impoverished and desperate little community of immigrants is seen through the eyes of a young boy, son of a Nepalese man and a Korean mother who has abandoned them.

There’s an interview with Donald Keene, pre-eminent expert on Japanese literature, who in his late 80s, not long after the tsunami, earthquake and nuclear accident last year, decided to leave the United States and become a Japanese citizen.

I’ve always thought that Chinese criticism of the Party and bureaucracy was inevitably an earnest affair. Jimmy Qi’s ‘Yu Li: Confessions of an Elevator Operator‘ (translated by Harvey Thomlinson, whose Hong Kong based Make-Do Press has a novel by Jimmy Qi in the pipeline) demonstrates definitively that this just isn’t so. At one level this story is a completely serious satire, but at another it’s an immensely enjoyable piece of silliness.

I plan to keep my subscription up.

3 Comments

Posted in Books

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Apology, part 4

Posted on 13 October 2012 | 1 comment

Nearing the end of my versification of Alan Jones’s ‘apology’ press conference. Click here for Part 1 and here for Mr Jones’s press conference, from which – believe it or not – a lot of this is taken verbatim:

‘Put Julia in a chaff bag – yes, it’s true
I said that. I said, Drop her out at sea.
But not to drown out there in the big blue.
No! See if she’d swim home! Analogy!
And metaphor! That’s what my dad would do
with damaged goods out in the bush, you see.
I bought the chaffbag jacket at the bash.
Those poor beleaguered people need the cash.

‘If I must be belted up, well here I am,
off my own bat. (I don’t know how this chap
got in there – he’s a liar and a sham.)
It’s like Gallipoli, we face the shrap-
nel from Turk Gillard. It’s like Vietnam:
dark humour as we hear death’s dark wings flap.
No joke, that phrase that I, naive, repeated:
Our backs are to the door. And now it’s sheeted

‘home to me. But think of Kevin Rudd.
Like him or not, he was Prime Minister,
and his own party trashed him as a dud.
This bit’s best left unsaid, but it’s so sinister:
Holy Nelly, the ALP slings mud
and don’t apologise. This one’s a mini-stir.
I spoke unwisely. Now they’re hurling stones
and tweeting flak to silence Alan Jones.

‘Are we sure the tape wasn’t faked by them?
Did I say this awful thing? Or am I clean?
Julia said her problems as PM
weighed heavy on her dad. What did she mean?
I do not say aloud, at least pro tem,
that she meant he felt shame. I know she’s been
shown up as a liar many times.
A good dad would feel bad about such crimes.’

Dear patient reader, not much more to go.
He meant no harm. He likes her and her dad.
It was no joke, but echoed people’s woe.
He don’t remember making such a bad
remark. He made it at a private show
and was recorded by a total cad
who may have faked it. It was mostly true.
Others have done worse. He’s true blue.

Tune in again in a couple of days for the thrilling conclusion – surely. The Press conference went for 43 minutes. I should be able to bring it home in under 23 stanzas. The bits that made me start out on this enterprise are yet to come: ‘I didn’t say women are destroying the joint,’ ‘I didn’t call her a liar, and ‘I’ve never called anyone a bitch ever.’

1 Comment

Posted in Books

Tagged ,