Category Archives: Books

Don Watson’s High Noon

Posted on 15 Dec 2024 | 3 comments

Don Watson,  High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the brink (Quarterly Essay 95, September 2024)

Eight years ago Don Watson reported on the presidential election face-off between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. According to my blog post, his Quarterly Essay 63, The Enemy Within: American politics in the time of Trump dwelled on Bernie Sanders as belonging to ‘a much assailed and greatly debilitated, but unbroken American tradition of democratic socialism’, and expanded his point by focusing on the history of the state of Wisconsin.

In this Quarterly Essay, as Trump is once again up against a female opponent, Watson doesn’t have a third option to discuss but he again goes local, and gives fascinating brief histories of two US cities, Detroit and Kalamazoo. These snapshots, plus his reports on conversations with Trump supporters, make the essay worth reading even though its journalistic moment is past. Maybe it’s even more readable now, because its resistance to the temptation to predict outcomes might have frustrated his readers three months ago.

The fifteen pages on Detroit are excellent: Watson traces the city’s history from the first half of the twentieth century when:

White folk from the economically depressed regions of the United States, especially Appalachia and the South; Black folk from the South and east-coast cities where wages were low and jobs hard for Blacks to get; Poles, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Germans, and people from the Middle East and the countries of Central America were all drawn to Detroit by the unstoppable car industry and the promise of five dollars a day.

In 1960 it had a population of 1.8 million. Since then ‘the city that gave the world the Ford Mustang and Stevie Wonder’ has fallen on hard times as the motor industry collapsed. Corruption, racism, predatory lending, the destruction of unions had their effects:

Detroit became a shrinking city of the poor, the poorly educated, the unemployed and the unskilled. A city of crime: corrupt in its high places, its streets plagued with violence, theft, arson, prostitution, drug dealing and addiction.

Detroit, Watson writes, ‘was the definitive American city … For a city like Detroit to fail was more than a disaster, it was a humiliation.’ Yet, his strategy of focusing on this one city, and then the contrasting city of Kalamazoo, brings home the immense diversity of the United States. It’s not a country where one story covers all.

There are insightful discussions of Trump and Harris, but you know, though I’m as mesmerised by the Trump phenomenon as anyone could be, I can’t bear to say much about that here.

The essay ends with the date: 23 August 2024. It was written after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, after the Democratic Convention, but before the ‘They’re eating the dawgs’ debate.

Even the Correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay was written before the election results were known.

In the correspondence, Tom Keneally, lively as ever, contrasts Australian and US politics but doesn’t engage with Watson’s essay in any detail. David Smith, who did his PhD in Detroit, makes fascinating additions to Watson’s account of that city, including more examples of how unhinged US public life can be. Bruce Wolpe, senior fellow at the US Studies Centre, does a nice job of validating and amplifying Watson’s points. And Paul Kane, among other things former director of the Mildura Literary Festival, praises Watson for his ‘adroit outsider’s perspective’, and, in a lovely three and a half pages, manages to include references to or quotes from Raph Waldo Emerson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Penn Warren (All the King;’s Men, 1946), Father Charles Coughlin (a whiff from my Catholic childhood), Woody Guthrie, Plato, John Stuart Mill, Wordsworth, and Barry Hill. He concludes with Benjamin Franklin’s reply when asked if the Constitution had established a monarchy or a republic: ‘A republic, if you can keep it.’

Both Don Watson’s essay and the responses to it are full of the pleasures of language. The subject is grim, and even grimmer when read after the event, but the telling of it is a joy to behold

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where we have had very heavy rain and are now sweltering in great humidity and heat. Cicadas are deafening. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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The Book Group and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

Posted on 12 Dec 2024 | 5 comments

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023)

Before the meeting: We picked this book as our next title the day before it won the Booker Prize. Smart us!

Four men and two women on a space station orbit the Earth sixteen times in twenty-four hours. They eat, they monitor experiments with plants and mice, they do strenuous exercise to counteract the bodily effects of living in low-gravity, they maintain their environment and monitor their own vital signs, they report back to ground control, they exchange messages and images with their loved ones at home, they occasionally have weirdly unreal conversations with complete strangers on Earth, and they look out with wonder at the planet below them and at the vastness of space.

That’s the plot.

A writer less sure of herself might have developed a plot where the relationships among the travellers create conflict or titillation. There would be plenty of possibilities in the crew consisting of two Russian men, an Irish woman, a Japanese woman, a Christian man from the USA, and a Latino man with connections in the Philippines. But the subject of this novel is the humans’ relationship to the planet, and beyond that to the universe, from a perspective that makes the conflicts that dominate human life in general seem absurd.

At the front of the book there’s a diagram showing the pathway of the spacecraft’s orbit over the day. The craft flies / falls in a straight line, but the rotation of the planet beneath it means that it crisscrosses the land and ocean below. I kept flipping back to the diagram as chapter by chapter, one for each of the sixteen Earth orbits in the day, describes in lyrical language what can be seen below.

This book is ideal for my blogging practice of singling out a particular page, currently page 77, because though there is a narrative of sorts it’s not the kind that means one has to be wary about spoilers. Part of what makes this book a worthy winner of the Booker is its brilliance at the sentence level.

Page 77 is in the chapter ‘Orbit 8, ascending’. Though the craft is over the south-west of the USA, the narrative departs, as it does occasionally, from what lies below to describe what is happening on the other side of the planet:

Over there, in tomorrow, the typhoon summons winds of a hundred and eighty miles per hour. It’s rampaging through the Mariana Islands. The sea levels off the islands’ coasts have already risen with the expansion of the warmer water, and now, where the winds push the sea toward the westward edges of its basin, the sea rises more and a five-metre storm surge engulfs the inlands of Tinian and Saipan. It’s as though the islands are hit with cluster bombs – windows blown out, walls buckling, furniture flying, trees splicing.

There follows a little more description of the typhoon from a meteorological perspective. Its growth is the book’s one central narrative thread. In later chapters, the crew see it as spectacle – contrasted with the terrifying reality on land, especially as it affects a poor family who once offered hospitality to one of them.

But for now, the daily routine asserts itself:

The crew go on with the last of their tasks. Anton eats an energy bar to fight off late afternoon drowsiness. Shaun removes the four fasteners on the bracket of the smoke detector that needs replacing. Chie inspects the bacteria filters. Their path now ups and overs and exits America where the Atlantic is ancient, the placid silver-grey of a dug-up brooch. Calm suffuses this hemisphere. And with no ceremony they complete another lap of the lonely planet. They top out some three hundred miles off the Irish coast.

And then there’s this:

ln passing through the lab, Nell looks out and sees the promise of Europe on the watery horizon. She feels somehow speechless. Speechless at the fact of her loved ones being down there on that stately and resplendent sphere, as if she’s just discovered they’ve been living all along in the palace of a king or queen. People live there, she thinks. I live there. This seems improbable to her today.

This intermingling of more or less objective observations of the Earth as seen from orbit, the daily routines of life in the space station, moments of lyrical reflection is maintained, with miraculous poise, through the whole book.

The meeting: We’ve been calling our bring-a-plate meetings gentlemen’s picnics. This one was an actual picnic, in Bicentennial Park on the shores of Blackwattle Bay, Gadigal land. Pavlova, quiche, dumplings, barbecued sausages eaten to a backdrop of birdsong and practising dragon boats beneath a three-quarter moon. We were interrupted briefly by what seemed to be a gay bashing – eight men of certain ages tried to look imposing as we lumbered towards the scene, but it seemed to vanish before we reached it. We conferred with a couple of men who were dossing down in the Esther Abrahams pavilion, and with a cluster of hefty teenage boys, and decided there was nothing further any of us could do.

It was our final meeting for the year, so we swapped gift-wrapped books (I scored a Zadie Smith) and most of us read a poem: David Malouf, Robert Frost, me and John Levy (it was unclear whether I’d broken a rule by reading one of my own, but it was excused because my poem was there to illuminate John’s), Brecht, James Baldwin.

In the middle of this mostly joyous occasion, we managed to talk about the book. The first thing said could have been a paraphrase of my fourth paragraph above: what a relief that Samantha Harvey didn’t go down the track of having big conflicts among the crew. My sense is that everyone enjoyed the book a lot.

We reminded each other of ‘good bits’: the lab mice learning to live in low gravity, the tear drop that has to be caught and disposed of because free-floating liquid can’t be tolerated, the nose pressed against a stomach as two characters squeeze past each other … Someone mentioned what should have been obvious: though the crew sees sixteen sunrises, they all happen on the same day – I took that in my stride while reading the book, but when it’s put like that it leaves me gasping.

One person found a lot of the book tedious and repetitive, but later, driving in the car, he realised that the repetition was partly the point, these people were caught in a continuous loop.

The closest we came to disagreement was when someone said the absence of ordinary, everyday irritations and conflicts among the crew strained his credulity. In real life, people living together in such close quarters would inevitably grate on each other at best. Two arguments were offered to counter this view. First, on the level of verisimilitude, the crew are disciplined – they can live with an itch in a space suit for hours without scratching, surely they can put personal irritations aside. Second, yes it’s unrealistic, but to pay attention to such matters would have cluttered the book or even taken it to a different, less interesting place. (One of us has spent some months in a hut in the Antarctic, so could vouch for the likelihood of conflict – though he was the one who argued most strongly that these are disciplined space travellers.)

It was a terrific end to another Book Group year.

Photo by Steve Kennedy, used with permission

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Andrew Burke’s Historic Present

Posted on 10 Dec 2024 | Leave a comment

Andrew Burke, Historic Present (Flying Island Pocket Poets 2023)

The ‘About the author’ paragraph at the back of this book begins ‘Andrew Burke was an Australian author’ – and you realise that the Acknowledgements two pages earlier were written very soon before the writer’s death in his 79th year (as confirmed by his Wikipedia entry), and that one of the last things Andrew Burke wrote was this tiny love note:

The many moods of this collection were suffered in partnership with my wife, Jeanette – so thanks for discussions over blueberries and porridge.

The preceding ninety pages of poetry do reflect and capture many moods, and it’s not hard to imagine the man who wrote them enjoying a quiet chat over blueberries and porridge – not just with his wife but with a community of poets living and dead. Many of those poets find their ways into the verse, either by name or by quotation, very occasionally in a way that made me go googling, but mostly as a way of invoking a community, of readers as well as writers of poetry.

There are poems of travel and childhood memory, poems marking the death of a friend, poems that seem above all to be recording a passing moment. They don’t strive for effect or makes a song and dance of their emotional content or insights, but quietly do their work and are gone.

‘Testicular Check-up’, for example, begins:

I fell in love with my balls
all over again when
they were endangered.

(You’ve got to love those line breaks!) What follows is a good humoured conversation with the ‘lady’ scanning his testicles. He doesn’t spell out the emotional content of the moment. Enough to say that amid the chat and the matter-of-fact handling, first of his penis then of each testicle, he feigns comfort and indifference, the repetition of the word ‘feigning’ lying like a blanket over what is left unsaid.

Page 77* falls in the middle of the book’s longest poem, ‘Lone Patrol: Darlington 1991’. Again looking to Wikipedia, I find that Darlington is a small community some distance east of Perth frequented by artists. The speaker of this poem is living in someone else’s cottage, perhaps an Airbnb (or the 1991 equivalent) or a writerly retreat, or just to take a break from a difficult time on his life. He chats with a visitor, attends an AA meeting, writes, listens to Jack Kerouac, reflects on his life, enjoys the surroundings.

The poem is in 23 sections, and reads like notes on his time in the cottage. These lines, from page 78, referring to work he is doing on another poem, shed light on the nature of this poem:

'Triplog' poem edited
___________ down to 15 pages
but what to do
with such an
________idiosyncratic poem ...

‘Log’ isn’t a bad description of the current poem – ‘staylog’ perhaps, part journal, part jottings of observations and reflection. And it’s not hard to imagine that it has been edited down from copious daily notes to its 14 pages. I usually look for an overarching narrative in long poems, but here I couldn’t see anything other than a string of moments – and I’m happy with that.

Page 77:

The first two sections are short haiku- or senryu-like poems.

The first, as I read it, juxtaposes the speaker’s grim mood (‘Comedian – / no!’) with the cheerfulness of the natural world, represented by kookaburra’s laughter. Whether the laughter is derisory (the kookaburra is laughing at the poem’s speaker) or simply indifferent (the kookaburra is just laughing without reference to him) is left open.

The second is less successful. I googled ‘Do bees fart?’ Apparently it’s an age-old question, and they sort of do but not really. My sense is that the poem doesn’t care about that. It catches itself in a cliche celebration of flowers in the spring, and throws in a bit of vulgarity to shake the image up. (It does make me want to echo the earlier lines: ‘Comedian – no!’, but in a friendly way.) You might enjoy the way ‘break wind’ has a second, more literal meaning – the bee interrupts the flow of the breeze. If so I’m happy for you.

The third section starts out as a prosaic to do list, then in the second stanza that prosaicness finds what in my distant university days was called an ‘objective correlative’ – an embodiment of the underlying emotion:

I stare at the dry stick
propped against the wall

The narrative behind the matter-of-fact notes ‘pay car reg / pay lawyer’ comes more fully into view – there may be a divorce in the mix:

_________ all
creativity gone, energy,
sapped by money
and marriage hassles.
dry.

The section goes on, to describe an afternoon of talking, and then of trying to write. It ends, taking the image of the dry stick one step further:

dead spider talks
about mortality

Unlike the kookaburra, the dead spider (on a windowsill?) reminds him of his mortality; or perhaps he himself, dead-spider-like, can’t write of anything but death.

The poem is a staylog, and also a pretty matter-of-fact account of what a more egotistical person might have called a Dark Night of the Soul. In 1991, the poet was approaching 50. Perhaps the matter-of-factness was there at the time, or perhaps the poem got to its present form much more recently, and the matter-of-factness comes from the thirty-plus intervening years.

It’s a bitter-sweet thing to meet a poet only after he has died. But it is sweet.

I wrote this blog post on Gade / Wane. I acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia.

* My blogging practice is to focus on page 77 (at least until I turn 78). In books like this, the practice saves me the impossible task of choosing one poem to represent them all.

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Three books by John Levy, and November verse 10

Posted on 22 Nov 2024 | 3 comments

John Levy, 54 Poems: Selected and New (Shearsman Press 2023)
––, To Assemble an Absence (above/ground press 2024)
––, Guest Book for People in My Dreams (Proper Tales Press 2024)

John Levy has commented generously a couple of times on this blog (here’s a link). When he emailed to ask if I’d like a copy of his recent book, with no expectation to blog about it, of course I said yes, provided I could send him one of mine. So we swapped books: I sent him two, he sent me three, an unequal exchange in more ways than the obvious. He has responded to my efforts with what I now know to be his characteristic generosity. And now I am blogging about his, motivated by joy, not obligation.

John’s books arrived when I was sitting down to lunch with the Emerging Artist and our grandchildren. I flipped 54 Poems open to the first page, and read out the prose poem ‘Kyoto’:

Kyoto

I'm at a temple. A young monk in black robes walks by, looks at me, 
stops. He points to my long hair. Brown. Then to my goatee. Red. He 
touches my armpit and looks puzzled. I point to my hair. He points to 
my crotch. I point to my hair. He invites me in for green tea.

The children liked it, probably because of the crotch reference. The Emerging Artist liked it, possibly because of the colour play. I liked it for both those reasons, and also for the comedy about communication and connection that don’t need words.

These three books reminded me that poetry can be a lot of fun. It can deal with death and loss, all manner of elevated cultural matters, or issues encountered when working in a Public Defender’s office, and still be fun. It can talk to goats and spiders and be silly about words, while still being serious. It can be warm without being goopy, and self-referential without being wanky.

Naturally, I went Googling. Among other things, I found John being interviewed on the website of Touch the Donkey, a small quarterly poetry journal published by above/ground press, publishers of one of these chapbooks. In that interview, he describes his approach:

I begin writing a poem (or prose poem) without knowing what I am going to say after the first few words that I thought of to begin with. Sometimes … I begin with a friend in mind and want to write something for the friend although I usually haven’t figured out anything beyond wanting to write something to that friend.

It’s poetry impro.

No doubt these poems have been polished and revised, but they retain the feeling of immediacy, of the poet’s mind chasing associations like a distractable child in a toy shop, and then they resolve themselves as if by magic.

I’ll stick to ‘Levy’sAccordion Straps’ on page 77–78*. I apologise for the quality of these images:

You could call this a rabbit-hole poem. It doesn’t start in exactly the way Levy describes in the interview above, but it’s in the same paddock. It’s a comic version of close reading: he takes a single word from Gregory O’Brien’s poem ‘A Genealogy’ (of which we know nothing else), and sees where it takes him. Maybe it’s the obsessive copy editor in me, but I love it that the poem starts from what turns out to be a misspelling. We tend to think of USA-ers as culturally arrogant, but Levy here has the humility to check the ‘variant’, and then stays open to the possibility that they do things differently in New Zealand. (There’s an Easter egg in line 24: Levy slips in a typo of his own, adding a space in Angelo Dipippo’s surname.)

As the poem progresses in an apparently random manner, it turns out that it features quite a bit of English as spoken/written by people not from the USA. There’s quiet humour, but not, I think, mockery. The last line made me laugh out loud. Instead of seeing the ‘detour’ as taking him away for a moment from O’Brien’s poem, he sees it as having changed the kind of attention he brings to it.

And now, because it’s November, here’s an hommage (with an advance note – Mruphy’s [sic] Law decrees, ‘If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written’):

Verse 10: Dear John

YouTube. Angelo Di Pippo
plays, you said, 'La vie en rose'.
I can’t find him (you’ve got a typo
in his surname, Mruphy knows).
I do find other Piaf splendours –
Galliano working wonders. 
Music takes me in its arms,
an infant whose late night alarms
are soothed by father’s tender crooning.
Jean, who says she’s ninety-one,
comments that life then was fun.
I googled “Levy’s straps” this morning,
found them, surfed around some more,
found fancy watch straps made by Shaw.

I finished this blog post on Awabakal country, near what is now one of the biggest coal ports in the world. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Journal Catch-up 26: Meanjin Winter 2024, and November verse 6

Posted on 12 Nov 2024 | Leave a comment

Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 2 (Winter 2024)
(links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)

This Meanjin is incredibly rich and varied. I’ve carried it in my backpack for weeks, mostly reading a single article or story at a time when on public transport, in waiting rooms or queues, or occasionally – as in the days before podcasts – while walking. I have learned about:

Click on any link in that list, and you may find something instructive, challenging, entertaining or all three.

As the child of a farmer in North Queensland, where Mamu land has never been ceded and sugarcane monoculture has not been kind to the land, I was particularly moved by Katherine Wilson’s brief memoir about regenerative farming and collaboration with traditional owners, ‘Our Bog Paddock’s Understory‘.

I also want to mention ‘We, small heroes‘ by Micaela Sahhar, a short reflection on what it means in the current era that Palestinian culture has hospitality as a core value.

Of the four excellent pieces of fiction, Katerina Gibson’s ‘Something Dormant‘ stands out as a complex story of young, unrequited love remembered, with an environmental twist.

One of the joys of this Meanjin is the way its nine poems are spread throughout, so each one comes as a pleasant surprise among the prose. Having just this morning read an editorial on ‘eco-poetry’ in the Guardian (poetry ‘cannot ignore global heating’), I’ll single out Caitlin Maling’s ‘Ordinary Disaster‘, a chillingly affectless account of a mass dying of fish among coral in Western Australia.

It’s my blogging custom to focus on page 77. In November, I try to include a verse stanza in each blog post. Page 77 in this issue is part of a fascinating interview with architecture critic Naomi Stead (link here). The phrase that gives me my opening line comes from this paragraph:

I don’t want to be the schoolmarm, but if people understand more about the built environment – how it’s procured, how it comes into being, how it’s not an accident, how there’s almost nothing in our cities that is not deliberately designed – then they can begin to see the role that they themselves could play. I mean we should expect more, we should demand more of our cities and buildings and built environment, but we can only do that with a degree of knowledge and education about how this came to be, and what could be.

Rather than enlarge on Professor Stead’s point, my little verse follows where the phrase takes it. That and the plane that flew over our flat as I typed the first full stop.

November verse 6: We should demand more of our cities
We should demand more of our cities.
Not more aircraft overhead.
No more oh-dears, what-a-pities –
Packer's Pecker, Jeff's Shed.
Perhaps less civil inattention,
less of what's too gross to mention,
neighbours partying till four,
Mormons knocking on the door.

Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney,
Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney, 
give me silence, show me stars,
let me breathe air free from tars.
So many things I'd have you give me.
Make your waters clear again,
and some day soon please change your name

I wrote this blog post on Gade / Wane, not far from Warrane, which some people want to give its name to the whole of Sydney. I acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal Elders past present and emerging, and gratrefully acknowldge their care for this land for millennia.

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November verse 4 & Montaigne progress report 8

Posted on 6 Nov 2024 | 4 comments

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech)
– part way through Book 2, essay 40, ‘On the resemblance of children to their fathers’ to part way through Book 3, essay 5, ‘On Some lines from Virgil’

Montaigne’s essays become even more interesting as he ages. By Book 3, he writes about his chronic pain from ‘the stone’ and, especially in the innocuously titled ‘On some lines from Virgil’, he does some spectacular writing about sexual politics.

I expect that whole books have been written about Montaigne and sex. I won’t try to untangle any of it here. I’ll just quote the paragraph from today’s reading that has given my poem its opening line. (For those who came in late, this November I’m writing at least 14 fourteen line poems, the first line of each coming from something I’ve heard or read that day.) The paragraph will give you just a glimpse of the complexity of Montaigne’s thought:

We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.

I think he’s saying that making sexual behaviour a major criterion for a woman’s reputation is wrong; men make the rules that condemn women’s ‘immorality’; and the punishments are much worse than the so-called crimes. Further on in the essay he says that social expectations on women to be chaste are an intolerable burden.

I don’t know if he is putting a proto-feminist case, or arguing deviously that women should be more sexually available to men. Or both. Either way, it’s fascinating to have a voice from a very different epoch wrestling with questions that aren’t exactly resolved today.

But before I leave Montaigne for my own versification, I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph from Book 2, which follows some strong opinions about the medical profession, and rings out like a beacon of rationality for our times:

I do not loathe ideas which go against my own. I am so far from shying away when others’ judgements clash with mine … that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by Nature is variety – even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms – I find it much rarer to see our humours and purposes coincide. In the whole world there has never been two identical opinions, any more than two identical hairs or seeds. Their most universal characteristic is diversity.

Yay Montaigne!

But on with my verse, which takes the phrase somewhere else altogether – and you can probably see the point when news from the USA knocked the poem off its tracks:

November verse 4: We do not weigh the vices fairly
We do not weigh the vices fairly,
thumb the scales to suit our whim:
I exaggerate, quite rarely –
you tell fibs – but look at him!
His lies destroy the trust that binds us,
lead us where no truth can find us.
Crowds have wisdom, mobs can rule,
electorates can play the fool.
He's murderous and self-regarding,
incoherent, vile, inane.
He once could boast a showman's brain,
but principles are for discarding.
Lord of Misrule, theatre's Vice:
How could you choose him once, then twice?

This blog post was written on Gadigal-Wangal land, where the tiny lizards are enjoying the beginning of hot weather, and jacarandas are the land’s most spectacular guests. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation.

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Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and November verse 2

Posted on 2 Nov 2024 | 7 comments

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (HarperCollins 2011)

The first half of The Song of Achilles is in effect a Young Adult boy-meets-boy love story, as the demigod Achilles befriends our narrator Patroclus, one of his father’s many foster-sons. The friendship becomes increasingly steamy until, while the language remains as chaste as anyone could wish, the two teenage boys find rapture in each other’s arms and are soon tacitly acknowledged as a couple. ‘Patroclus is my sworn companion,’ Achilles announces at a state occasion. ‘His place is beside me.’ This is against the will of Achilles’ goddess mother, Thetis.

Most of my readers won’t need to be told that Patroclus and Achilles are key characters from The Iliad, and that the emotional heart of that epic is Achilles deep love of Patroclus and his inconsolable grief when Patroclus is killed. This novel is mainly back story. The explicit sex isn’t so much a departure from the original as a confirmation.

At about the halfway point, after spending years being trained by the centaur Chiron and an episode in which Achilles hides out dressed as a girl, the two young men arrive with the vast Greek war force at the beach near Troy. Achilles is now acclaimed as the greatest of the Greek warriors, and the second half of the book is a completely engrossing retelling of The Iliad.

Because it’s November*, I won’t linger on page 77, when teenaged Patroclus wakes up in bed next to Achilles in Chiron’s cave. Instead, I have gone to page one, and read until I came to a potential first line for an Onegin stanza. The book begins with Patroclus’ mentally incompetent mother and his own physical ineptitude (the only element in Madeline Miller’s telling that conflicts with my own reading of The Iliad – it had never occurred to me that Patroclus was less than formidable). Patroclus’ first glimpse of Achilles is when Patroclus is five years old. Achilles is among the youngest boys who compete in games hosted by Patroclus’ royal father and, being a demigod, he wins. This is in spite of being easily the youngest competitor: ‘He is shorter than the others, and still plump with childhood in a way they are not.’

In the book, this last sentence signifies that Achilles is gifted well beyond his years. When I nicked part of it for my first line, my mind went somewhere completely different, to a memory from 60+ years ago. 

Verse 1: Nudgee College, 1961–1962
He is shorter than the others,
thinner too, not seen as cool.
We've all been sent here from our mothers, 
to this Christian boarding school,
sons of far-flung Queensland farmers,
just four hundred teenage charmers:
ten grown men. It's no surprise
that kindness doesn't rule our days.
His nakedness provokes derision,
soapsuds sprinkled in his sheets
cause eczema, and laughter greets 
his asthma. Here's my shamed admission:
terrified, I turn my back
glad it's not me they attack.

OK, maybe tomorrow will get cheerful.

Added later: Inspired by the online course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) I’m currently doing, here’s a chance-based/ procedural poem created from The Song of Achilles. It begins with the book’s first word beginning with A, which is followed by the first word after that to begin with B, and so on. It took 52 pages to get to ‘Zeus’.

A built ceremony
did eye forward
glints.
He is jest kneeling
looked man
not one present quieted
raised
said things
upbringing vividness
when exile you Zeus

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, and am posting it as lorikeets shout to each other about the rain that is about to come down. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, over which their sovereignty has never been ceded.

* For the last 14 years, I have challenging myself to write fourteen 14-line poems during November. The poem may be inspired by a book I’m blogging about, or may be connected to it by the vaguest of tangents, as here.

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Sophie Finlay’s Terrarium

Posted on 31 Oct 2024 | Leave a comment

Sophie Finlay, The Terrarium (Flying Island Books 2024)

Sophie Finlay won the Flyng Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets 2022. A visual artist as well as a poet, she designed the book, and both the cover image and the photographs and delicate drawings scattered throughout are hers. It’s a beautiful, pocket-sized object.

The poems cohere around a main theme, summed up nicely in the final words of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which serve as a kind of epigraph:

whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

As I understand it, the central idea of the book is to imagine the earth as a gigantic terrarium, in which one can observe the wonders of living things, often with scientific labels attached (poem titles include ‘Zooxanthellae’, ‘Morphologies of Ice’, ‘Glossopteris’ and ‘Noctilucent’), reaching back to the very beginnings of life, but including accidental personal matters such as a fear of snakes and a trip to Antarctica.

Interspersed among the other poems are six ‘extinction’ poems. Each of the first five of these comes with an indication of date: from the End-Ordovician extinction 455-430 mya (million years ago) to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction 65 mya. The fifth, which is also the book’s final poem, refers to the Anthropocene extinction, no date necessary. These numbered poems aren’t section headings: in the midst of much else, they sound an ominous background drumbeat. Individual poems pay attention to detail but, just like in the real world, there’s a deep current that cannot be ignored.

‘Frayed network’ on Page 77* is a moment when the ominousness is mostly at bay, there is no scientific nomenclature, and attention is on the present moment in the natural world.

This poem might be a nice entry point for readers who are intimidated or bewildered by contemporary poetry. It’s definitely one that could have prompted the question a friend of mine asked at a Sydney Writers’ Festival session, ‘Why have modern poets given up rhyme and metre?’. The words are spread out all over the page, I imagine my friend complaining, the punctuation is mostly no help, and where are the verbs?

But slow down, spend a little time, and I think even my indignant friend might find pleasure here.

The poem takes its readers on a walk among trees beside a lake. Line by line, the speaker notes details from the environment: the jewel-like clover, the luminous frail membranes (what a lovely phrase!) of new grass, the sounds of lapping water and the feel of a breeze. There’s a hint that this is a new beginning: at the end of a drought, perhaps or in the aftermath of a bushfire. When else would you think of grass as frail? These details are just there, each its own thing, with no attempt to tie them into a pattern or narrative with a formal rhyme scheme or metre, or sentence structure, or even an orderly presentation on the page. There’s a lot of white space, a visual equivalent of silence.

It’s a mindful kind of walking, just noticing, not trying to make meaning or extract usefulness.

Then, interspersed among the images there are three sentences, each of them about the speaker:

How often I walk in quietude

At the third line, the poem’s speaker and her situation is made explicit. ‘Quietude’ is a formal word for a state of tranquility, suggesting quietness and solitude.

The second formal sentence occurs at lines six and seven. Its subject isn’t clear. Something, probably the totality of all the things that have been noticed – the clover, tree-trunks, new grass, breeze, sound of water lapping and trees –

___________------_____ frames
____________ my crumbled red interior

This is the only ‘difficult’ line in the poem, and also (no pun intended) its heart, in two senses. First, straightforwardly, it’s roughly the middle line of the poem. Second, more interestingly, it moves momentarily from the external environment to the inner life. The red interior suggests the colour of blood and internal organs, perhaps especially the heart. But ‘crumbled’? It does suggest some kind of diseased state, though I don’t know of one that would merit that adjective – some kind of clotting, perhaps, but that would be stretching it. I’m happy to let the word remain suggestive rather than carrying a definite meaning. A heart that isn’t so much broken, perhaps, as dried out and eroded by sorrow.

The next lines take us back to details of the environment: a lake seen through the branches of a tree, or perhaps a branch dipping into the lake, and a nod towards the many lighting effects that a lake can produce: reflection, diffraction, blackness and lightness at the same time.

In the final three lines, the third subject–verb–object sentence, the poem’s speaker is front and centre: 

I need to feel the pulse of earth
_______ sleep with the dream of soil

___________------_______ slipping into my nerves

She is reaching for a connection with the land, to have it come alive in her dreams, to heal her crumbling elements. She needs to be, literally, grounded, with a hint, perhaps, in the word ‘dream’, of Indigenous concepts.

Which brings me to the title. There are two possible frayed networks here. Nerves are spoken of as frayed, and as networks. There is also the intricate ecological network of bush beside a lake, and to describe that network as frayed may be to pick up the hint of recent disaster in the frail membranes of grass. More generally, in our times it’s pretty well impossible to think of the natural environment without the effects of climate change coming to mind: all ecological systems are currently under stress. Yet, the poem affirms, the nervous system of a human can the ecological system of the bush can connect – need to connect.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where seasonal flowering is happening earlier with each passing year. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, over which their sovereignty has never been ceded.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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William Steig’s Shrek!

Posted on 22 Oct 2024 | 4 comments

William Steig, Shrek! (©1990, Puffin 2017)

We recently watched the original Shrek movie with our grandchildren, and all four of us enjoyed it. Both our children were adults in 2001 when it was made, and grandchildren were a long way off, so I hadn’t seen the movie before, though though I’d seen clips. Nor had I been drawn into the rest of the Shrek franchise – half a dozen movies, a Broadway musical, a theme park beside the Thames. But I was aware that behind it all was a book by the great children’s author-illustrator William Steig.

When we told our six-year-old, a voracious reader, about the book she was interested, so we borrowed a copy from the library.

The six-year-old read it, said she had enjoyed it, then put it aside. I read it to the four-year-old, he said he enjoyed it, but didn’t demand an immediate reread.

I think it’s a case of the movie adaptation of a book making the book unreadable – not in the sense that it’s a difficult or unpleasant experience, but that the much broader, louder, and sentimental effects of the movie make the sly, deadpan humour and linguistic charm of the original almost impossible to discern. For example, in the movie, Shrek’s love interest starts out as a stereotypically beautiful princess, and when (spoiler alert!) she turns into an ogre she still has a degree of feminine cuteness. The love interest in the book is hideous on first encounter and remains hideous: we are never invited to see past her or Shrek’s surface ugliness to their inner beauty and goodness. Steig’s book doesn’t lose its nerve. The central joke, that the hero and then his love interest have no redeeming qualities, holds firm, and the book trusts its readers to get it. We quite like that they are pleased with themselves and each other, but we don’t have to like them at all.

That reversal of conventions and the absence of reassurance are what make the book fun.

The pages of our library copy aren’t numbered, but by my count, this is page 7:

As you can see, William Steig’s Shrek has none of the movie Shrek’s gross charm. He’s just gross.

A witch has sent Shrek on a quest to find the princess he will wed. On the previous page he has encountered a peasant scything a field. The peasant has uttered a few lines of verse about his unconsidered life, and now this.

The rhyming wordplay – Pheasant, peasant … pleasant present – is typical of the joyful use of language throughout the book. The unconscious peasant, blue in the face where on the previous page he was a healthy pink, didn’t cause any evident distress in our young readers. I think they got the joke. It’s typical of Steig’s respect for young readers that he doesn’t spell out how the peasant lost consciousness. (We love Steig’s Doctor De Soto and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble for their similar tact.)

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, over which their sovereignty has never been ceded.

* My blogging practice is generally to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77. For short books like Shrek, I am stuck with page 7.

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Colleen Z Burke’s Cloud Hands

Posted on 20 Oct 2024 | Leave a comment

Colleen Z Burke, Cloud Hands (Feakle Press 2024)

Cloud Hands is Colleen Z Burke’s thirteenth book of poetry.

As in those of its forerunners that I’ve read, its typical poem is a short, impressionistic snapshot of landscape, or especially skyscape, mostly in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Newtown. As snapshots, these poems are mostly embedded in a specific moment, a specific circumstance, so we often get a sense of the life of the person taking the shot, and of the broader context.

There are also memories of a working-class childhood. ‘Each Way’, about gambling as part of the family’s way of life, begins, ‘Minor crime was woven / into our lives just like / the salty tang of the sea.’ (I can relate: my own family of origin wasn’t working class, but my farmer father, like Colleen Burke’s, was a patron of illegal SP bookies.)

There are a three poems (‘Illusion’, ‘A nefarious enterprise’ and ‘A magnet’) recalling youthful romance. Colleen’s partner was Declan Affley, the folksinger who accompanies Mick Jagger’s terrible rendition of ‘A Wild Colonial Boy’ in Tony Richardson’s 1970 movie Ned Kelly. Though it is many decades since he left us, he is still a vibrant presence in these poems.

There are people-watching poems, incidents from inner-suburban life, comments on the news, snippets of science and social history. Covid and the bushfires of 2019–2020 loom large. Climate change and environmental degradation threaten to sour the joys of the natural environment.

This is a collection that bears witness to a persistent practice of paying attention – to the world, to history, to life.

Page 77* is ‘Invisibility’:

Yes, page 77 of the last book I read had a pigeon poem too. But here the pigeons are oblivious rather than chatty, and the despair in the poem is not worn lightly.

This poem is a great example of the value of slow reading. At first quick reading, it’s a straightforward cry of the heart from the dark days of January 2022, when the Omicron variant of Covid was on the rampage in Sydney. In case you need reminding, there were no official restrictions on movement at that time, but Australia had moved from having a remarkably low level of serious illness and death from Covid to having among the highest. The assistance to individuals and businesses from the Federal government had largely dried up, and the Prime Minister of the time was trumpeting a business-as-usual message. Here’s a link to Mike Secombe on that nightmare in The Saturday Paper.

So this poem is, perhaps, an unremarkable record of how one woman suffered in that time: she has minimal contact with other people, she fills her time with solitary activities, and her age-related health issues go unattended to. Like most of us, she finds fault with the Morrison government’s handling of the situation.

That’s all there. But, interestingly, after I started writing this blog post I had a number of conversations that kept sending me back to the poem. One person spoke about a gobsmacking experience using the (I think) Apple Vision Pro goggles – it was as if he was in the room with a musician, could almost touch her. Someone else is reading Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger, and described her account of people involved in the riots of 6 January losing track of the difference between the gaming world and the actual world where there are consequences. Burke’s ‘sort of but it’s not the same’ stops feeling like a banal statement of the obvious and takes on a profound resonance. The poem expresses one woman’s feelings in a specified circumstance, but it sends ripples out well beyond it.

The other thing I noticed as I sat with the poem, or had it sit with me, is the part played by the pigeons. The poem begins, like many of Burke’s poems, with a moment of relaxation in the park – the breeze, pigeons, the earth, her breath slowing down. Then, with the word ‘oblivious’, it turns to the poet’s inner turmoil. The pigeons might have provided a calming anchor, their obliviousness an invitation to pay attention to the present moment. But it was not to be. Skip to the final lines, and the notion of obliviousness returns to round out the poem with ‘our leaders / ignoring reality’. The poem’s speaker is invisible to the pigeons who are engrossed in pecking the earth. She is also invisible to the political leaders who deny that the coronavirus is out of control. The tension between the pigeons’ focus on reality and the political leaders’ wilful ignoring of it is what holds the poem most satisfyingly together.

You can read my blog posts on some of Colleen Z Burke’s previous books here, here, here and here, and on her memoir The Waves Turn here.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where I believe Colleen Z Burke also lives. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, over which their sovereignty has never been ceded.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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