Long before the meeting: If not for the Book Club, I would have put this book aside at page 14. Betty is the seventh child in a desperately poor family in South London. Her Catholic mother dies soon after giving birth to a tenth live child. As Betty and her Protestant father emerge from church they pass the two priests who have said the funeral Mass, one ‘in a creamy chasuble with scarlet embellishments, the other sporting a gold-embroidered number’. Betty’s father delivers a tirade:
Tell my daughter Betty the truth on this day we’re burying her poor Catholic mother. Tell her that it’s all a lie and that you two – with your fancy clothes and your Latin gibberish and your snouts in the trough – you know it’s a lie. Your religion is a pack of fairy stories to bamboozle poor people and keep us in line. Tell her.
I don’t mind a bit of anti-Catholic vitriol. In my devout childhood I was intrigued by mockery of the saints in a Walter Scott novel, and as a 17-year old trainee religious I was thrilled by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. BUT this just gets too much wrong. Two priests saying Mass for a poor person’s funeral? Not likely! Even one priest standing at the door of the church still wearing his vestments? Also not likely! And even a quick google would have told the author (or certainly her editors) that priests wore black chasubles at funerals – never cream or (gasp!) scarlet.
But what the Book Club wants …
Before the meeting: I did persevere. It’s not a terrible book, and there were no other moments that felt so wrong.
Betty works in a factory, emigrates to Australia, falls in love and makes two lasting friendships on the ship, marries a rich man who becomes abusive then kills himself leaving her destitute. She has two children each of whom is problematic, protests against the Vietnam War, joins Women’s Liberation, spends some time living in Mexico where she loves swimming in cenotes, comes back to Australia for her daughter’s wedding, works in television where she eventually becomes a writer, has her heart broken a number of times, helps out in an AIDS ward, has a severe depressive episode, develops breast cancer, finds happiness when reunited with her first love, sees friends die. Oh, and there’s a daughter she gave out for adoption before leaving England. As she moves through the phases of her life her name changes: Betty, Beth, Elizabeth, Lizzie, Liz, and finally back to Betty. Sometimes I cared and was engaged, sometimes not so much. I did laugh a number of times.
I never got a feel for the narrative voice – the voice of 100-year-old Betty. There are self-conscious moments when Betty warns us (mostly disingenuously) that things won’t turn out as they do in novels, or expects us to be surprised at her earthiness, but these don’t create the sense of an actual person telling the story.
The penny dropped for me in Chapter 16, when a friend urges 63-year-old Betty to pitch a long-held idea for a show to a TV channel. Betty realises she no longer has ‘the stamina to deal with the machinery of TV drama, the muscle spasms of hope and dejection, the delicate calculations of conciliation and obstinacy required of you’. That night in bed, her husband suggests that she could put the idea into novel form, and Betty’s career as a novelist is launched.
Ah! I thought. One Hundred Years of Betty is really the treatment for a TV show. When it makes it to the screen, which is very likely, I’ll be happy to watch it.
I’m sorry to be so negative. I may have come to the book with inappropriate expectations. Maybe I was wanting the story of an individual life told in the context of world events in the manner of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Alan Hollinghead’s Our Evenings, or Ian McEwan’s The Lesson. Maybe I expected a fictionalised treatment of Debra Oswald’s mother’s generation, something probing and compassionate. This isn’t one of those books, and nor does it need to be.
After the meeting: Unusually, we met in a pub. As always with the Book Club, we had two books on our agenda. The other one, Susan Hampton’s Anything Can Happen, took up most of the discussion.
One of the other Catholics said she registered the problems with the post-funeral scene that so irritated me, but it hadn’t disturbed her. One of the non-Catholics said the scene felt very Anglican to her rather than Catholic.
A couple of people felt there was a box-ticking element: the songs, devices, events more or listed as a way of marking the different eras. Others felt that was a feature rather than a bug. Betty’s life touches on major events of her times, is sometimes significantly changed by them, without their ever becoming her central passionate concerns.
Someone described the book as an excellent summer beach read, engaging enough to keep you entertained without making big demands. She said it a lot better than that, and I think we all agreed.
The Book Club met, and I wrote this blog post, on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia. I welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.
Bronwyn Rodden, Stranded (Flying Island Pocket Poets Series 2024)
I have brought a stack of books from the Flying Island Pocket Poets series on a winter holiday. They’re perfect travel companions – physically light and small in size, but with engrossing content.
In the title poem of Stranded, an animal
It sticks its fine-pointed head into our picnic, our anger doesn't move it, its hunger ties it to us
It strikes me that Bronwyn’s poetry is a bit like that: the poems’ speaker sticks her fine-pointed head into all manner of subjects – places, people, animals, plants, paintings – with a hunger to observe and record. She travels to Ireland, Madagascar and Western Australia, stays in hotels in Adelaide and the Blue Mountains, and writes verse about what she sees.
Many of the poems are a very high-order version of the creative-writing exercise where you go for a walk around the block and then write a poem about what you have seen. It’s as if the reader is looking over the speaker’s shoulder on her travels and encounters. There’s an austere restraint about the poems: not the restraint of imagist poetry that aims to let the things speak for themselves, but a deliberate flatness of affect, an absence of reflexivity.
Because I’m short of time – so much walking and lying in the sun to do – I’ll limit myself to page 78. It’s a long way from being my favourite poem in the book, but a close-ish reading offers rewards:
Unusually, ‘Panda’ is a character sketch, but its unemotive language is characteristic.
Panda
Toenails round as fingernails, vermillion ovals pretty as cellophane bows tying up the beautiful, lacquered package that was her.
The stanza begins with the word ‘toenails’ and only arrives at the person belonging to them, ‘her’, at the last word. I imagine the poem’s speaker sitting in an airport or a cafe when her attention is caught by the carefully-tended toenails of a woman sitting nearby. Her first observation is that they are ’round as fingernails’. I have never thought of fingernails as round, but I can tell that there’s something singular about these. Then, improbably, they are likened to cellophane, which is justified after the beautifully placed line break: like cellophane bows wrapping a parcel, they are the final touch to the woman’s beauty regime.
In this stanza, the speaker portrays the other woman pretty much as an extension of the beautifully tended toenails. She is objectified – the speaker sees her as having objectified herself, made herself into a ‘beautiful, lacquered package’. But there’s something unsettling about the speaker’s relationship to her: she’s just an observer, free to describe the other woman without engaging with her as another fully human person, unaware that she is doing the objectifying.
The point of view shifts in the second stanza.
It all went well till they moved from Manila and the price of pedicures zoomed from fifty cents to twenty-five dollars. And she fell pregnant.
The woman is no longer an object but a person with a history. She has a nationality. She is in a relationship and has emigrated (‘they moved’). Her beauty regime has financial practicalities. She is a parent. The speaker is no longer summing her up on the basis of her toenails, but has engaged with her, imagining a life story for her. Or perhaps there’s a new speaker in this stanza, an omniscient narrator, or a friend who actually knows the woman and is tacitly reprimanding the speaker of the first stanza for her objectifying gaze. (Incidentally, notice the break at the end of the third line, which give the word ‘dollars’ a shocking emphasis.)
Then there’s another shift.
She’s still round as a panda, and her toenails are in-grown and her husband looks at her in old photographs in bathing suits.
The first stanza may have been patronising, but it sketched a beautifully turned-out woman. Now it seems that her self-packaging is an attempt to keep the ageing process at bay. The pretty toenails of the first stanza are now in-grown. Perhaps time has passed. Or perhaps the speaker has taken a closer look and seen past the toenails’ prettiness to their painful condition. Their roundness has become a feature of the woman herself.
Why ‘still round’? Is roundness an attractive quality? If so, what’s going on with the husband? There’s a terrific line break: ‘and her husband looks at her in’ … Is it going to be pity, disgust, or even – as that ‘and’ allows to be possible – desire? She may still have the qualities her husband found attractive (‘She’s still round’), but it turns out he prefers images of her younger self.
The third stanza is elusive. The image of the woman as a panda sets her up to be a comic figure – round, cuddly, likeable, but not an equal to the observer. There’s pathos in the way she tries, and fails, to keep her youthful beauty. And something is not being said: we are left wondering what is happening for the speaker. Has she maintained her mildly satirical, racism-tinted distance? Has the poem tipped over into pity, even contempt? Or is there an unstated undercurrent of solidarity, fellow-feeling – one woman of a certain age to another?
On first reading, I would have gone with the second option – pity, even contempt. I was dismayed that my page 78 rule meant I had to write about this poem and might have to invoke ‘own voices‘ rhetoric. But as I’ve sat with it, let it unfold in my mind, noticed in particular the litany effect of the ands in the third stanza, I’ve come to read it as essentially comradely. The question, ‘I’ve called her ‘Panda’, what would she call me?’ lurks just benerath the surface.
I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, beautiful Yunbenun, where yesterday I saw an echidna going about its business in the late afternoon. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
[7 August 2025: I’ve retrieved this post from my old blog because I’m currently reading a book by Geoff Page, and Lawrie & Shirley, reviewed here, is the only other book by him I’ve read since I started blogging]
Gillian Leahy’s movie Our Park has a special place in my heart because the park in question is my local park. But it’s got an even stronger hold on my affections because of its uncomfortable, even gruelling depiction of democracy in action. As they struggle over what use should be made of a little patch of semi-derelict land, people disagree passionately, at times (off camera) come to blows, and (on camera) declare intense animosity for each other. But things are thrashed out. Many points of view are heard. Everyone owns the final result.
That’s not how democracy works in Prime Minister John w Howard’s Australia. People do get beaten up, of course, mostly off camera and with a legal requirement not to talk about it. But disagreement with the government’s policies doesn’t get much of a look-in. Silencing Dissent is a chilling look at the way dissenting voices have been systematically intimidated, bribed, excluded, marginalised or drowned out over the last decade or so. It lists the democratic institutions that have been undermined: the media, the senate, non-government organisations, intelligence and defence services, the public service, universities. Because it’s a book of essays all making the same point, there’s quite a bit of overlap and repetition, but for slow learners like me that’s all to the good. A young friend of mine is fond of saying that the Coalition are Fascists (he intends the term precisely) and that only cowardice stops people from saying so; the detail accumulated in this book makes him seem less hyperbolic.
To cheer myself up I moved on to a bit of fiction by Flannery O’Connor. I hope that sentence doesn’t make her turn in her grave, but paradoxically there is something cheering about Wise Blood. It reads to me as if it was written in a trance – as if some twisted angel had dictated it and the young Ms O’Connor just wrote it down, trusting it would amount to something. Most of its characters are all ‘a little bit off their heads’ and some are a big bit off the rails. Hazel Motes, played by Brad Dourif in the John Huston movie which I plan to watch again on DVD soon, is in obsessive revolt against the punitive and repressive Christianity of his childhood, and burns with an evangelical imperative to preach a Church of Christ without Christ (I would have said cacangelical but the word doesn’t seem to exist).
I remember reading a review of the movie that compared Hazel to the Monty Python character who was trying to train ravens to fly underwater. That comparison captures the bleak comedy of the book, but leaves out the appalling sense of waste and, in the end, awe that Hazel inspires. Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic living in the southern US. The characters in this book are all Protestant. Maybe she’s observing them from the other side of a sectarian fence and seeing them as wildly deluded, but the pervasive sense of intractable mystery, of not-knowing, and the lack of overt authorial commentary, makes a sectarian reading seem wide of the mark. I finished the last page with a sense that I’d been taken somewhere dark, weird and scarily believable.
I read Waves as research for work. It reminded me in a roundabout way of an early review of David Williamson’s play The Removalists. As you probably know, in the course of that play, a man – Kenny – is terrorised and beaten up by two policemen. The review I’m thinking of by the late, magisterial H. G. Kippax, found fault with many aspects of the play, including the victimised man being described as a typesetter: according to Kippax, typesetters were not working-class yobbos like Kenny, but quirky individuals who were forever surprising their acquaintances with odd snippets of information. It came with the territory, you see: according to Harry, typesetters read much more widely, if also more shallowly, than normal people who weren’t handling other people’s words for their entire working lives. Like those possibly mythical beings, I often find myself acquiring information about the most unlikely subjects. Waves introduced me to a new world of specialised language: technical language for describing waves and related phenomena (lefties, beachbreaks, righties, peaks and barrels); jargon associated with surfing equipment and practice (coaming, mals, floaters, nosedives, guns); and the argot of the surfing culture, which includes but is not limited to the other two (groms, kahunas, charging and stoked).
The bit I enjoyed most was grand old champion surfer Nat Young’s 1974 encounter with Patrick White (whom Tim Baker describes disarmingly as a ‘gay literary luminary’). After Young is quoted as saying how important The Tree of Man had been to him, we are given this glimpse of Patrick White as filtered through a surfer sensibility:
This unlikely pair discovered they had a connection that went back twenty-five years. ‘He was living down at Werri at that stage, him and his boyfriend, and they were very much in love and they used to spend a lot of time walking on the beach. He said he used to watch surfing and watch waves. Werri, from my childhood, was very important because there was a golf club and it was abandoned and we used to go in and just stay there. And Patrick understood. He said, “Oh, we used to laugh about the way the golf club had turned into a derelict place and the surfers were squatting there on the weekends.” So he knew exactly where my head was at.’
Lawrie & Shirley was a birthday present from my niece Paula.
Somewhere along the line I’ve absorbed, without really noticing it, the notion that poetry should be difficult – if it’s not difficult it’s doggerel; almost: if it rhymes and has a sense of humour, it must be bad. Not that I hold these assertions to be true, but they have insinuated themselves into my brain. But hell, if Lawrie and Shirley is doggerel, then let’s have lots more.
It’s a rhyming narrative, ‘A Movie in Verse’, about a relationship between a man in his early eighties and a woman who’s not a lot younger. Each of its 47 ‘scenes’ opens with screenplay-style directions of the ‘INTERIOR. DAY’ variety, and the story progresses mainly through visuals and dialogue. It’s light, funny, has an unsurprising range of characters (middle-aged children who see their inheritances threatened, disapproving former friends, etc), and manages to feel like an enjoyable romantic comedy, albeit a geriatric one. The great fear that hangs over the characters isn’t death – everyone knows that death isn’t far off – but disability, and more specifically dementia. I wouldn’t say it’s a major focus, but it crops up from time to time. Like this, where Shirley takes Lawrie to visit her aunt Ida in a nursing home – also a nice example of how the jolly dump-de-dum of the tetrameters can tilt over into genuine pathos:
Shirley looks around the room,
trying to locate the smile
she'll recognise as Auntie Ida's.
And finds her after quite a while
away off in a distant corner,
wasting quietly in a chair,
doing absolutely nothing,
no recognition in her stare;
no smile, no words like 'Hello, Shirley';
no formula like 'Hello, dear'.
Shirley stoops to take her hand
and, fighting back a hidden tear,
sighs to Lawrie, close beside her,
'There's no one in there any more.'
Eventually, they turn about
and walk back down the corridor.
Cross-fade to a final shot
of Ida's vacant, lunar face,
a kind of undiscovered planet
staring coldly into space.
The Book Thief, another birthday present, is a terrific read. I guess it’s a YA title, though some of those famously nervous school libraries might have trouble with the swearing – even though it’s in German, it’s all meticulously translated. The action of the story takes place in a small community near Munich during the Second World War, and is narrated by Death, who doesn’t enjoy his work, is deeply curious about human beings and charmed by them even in the middle of the immense overwork of that period.
Such dark material, but delivered with delicacy, affection and even lightness. Some elements of the presentation might seem irritatingly tricksy to some readers, but they worked fine for me as something like aeration. There are two or three short books, lyrical graphic novels you might call them, within the book, and every now and then a short piece of text is separated from the body and printed in bold type with its own little heading: a key piece of dialogue, some background information on a character, statistics on parts of the war. I read a review somewhere online taking the book to task for trying to exculpate the German people over the murder of the Jews: that’s absolutely not how I read it. These are recognisably human people. They love their children; some take actions, small or huge, against the prevailing Nazis; all of them, willingly or by cruel force of circumstance, are complicit; and all of them suffer. The book has won awards, and it deserved them.
Leonard Cohen’s book is a weirdly mixed bag. There are some memorable serious poems, introspective and embarrassingly honest; and one or two witty throwaways. There are the lyrics of songs, several of which are on his 2004 album, Dear Heather (I’ve just listened to them, and they’re fabulous as songs). But too much of it reads like excerpts from his notebooks – whingeing effusions about being fat, old, failing in love and as a monk, past his prime as poet and singer if he ever had a prime – adorned by innumerable variations on the same gloomy charcoal self-portrait, most of them accompanied by gnomic handwritten annotation. My sense is that if Leonard Cohen wasn’t a celebrity this book wouldn’t have seen the light of day, or at least would have been a much slimmer volume. I suppose we should be grateful that his celebrity status derives largely from his writing! The longing of the book’s title is everywhere, shot through with despair. Frankly, as a preacher in a Peter Cook sketch once said about sex and violence in the movies, we get enough of that at home. When the poem ‘Titles’ asked me:
and now Gentle Reader in what name in whose name do you come to idle with me in these luxurious and dwindling realms of Aimless Privacy?
I was tempted to reply, ‘G-d alone knows.’ It’s a beautifully produced book, feels good in the hand, and there are some very good things in it. Deeply committed fans will almost certainly love it. I think his editor has let him – and us – down.
Sporadically I continue my way through the Bloom book: Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll made the cut, and make strange bedfellows indeed with Yeats, Hardy and the guy who wrote ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ (‘I have been faithful to you, Cynara, in my fashion’). In his commentary, Harold does seem to like letting us know about intimate or passionate relationships poets have with people of the same gender.
I’ve just started the Heat. Gillian Mears has multiple sclerosis, and some years ago had an unrelated, horrific medical crisis that brought her close to death. When she was securely back from the brink, she bought an old ambulance and set off on a solitary adventure, driving and camping solo for many months. Her account of it is the first article in this issue, and it makes me hope that she has a book in mind: there are Walden-ish moments in the New South Wales bush, House MD-ish urgencies, a beautiful rendering of the way a mind does unexpected things in crisis …
This book is another jewel in the Flying Island Pocket Poets series, more than 100 pocket-sized books (14 x 11 cm) so far, published under the stewardship of Kit Kelen. It’s a wonderful series, in which well-established poets appear cheek by jowl with brand new talents. You can subscribe here to receive 10 books at the start of each year.
The poems in Bitumen Psalms are mostly short, or sequences of short stanzas that might be stand-alone poems. I had to consult the table of contents a number of times to check whether what I was seeing on a page was a number of separate poems or the stanzas of a single poem. Mostly they weren’t, but publishing the poems without titles leaves open the possibility of reading them all as one continuous mega-poem.
The book is in seven sections. The first, ‘Bitumen Psalms’, is a long poem made up of short stanzas, each a glimpse seen from a car travelling from inland New South Wales to the sea. A recurring line, ‘I forbid the camera’ spells it out: these are word snapshots – similes and haiku-like compression in place of shutter-clicks.
‘All Weathers’ is seven pages of glimpses of people. ‘Marking Time’ is spent in hospital, whether as visitor or as patient is not clear, and doesn’t need to be. ‘Cast Your Wing’, the section I enjoyed most, begins with the poem ‘I don’t go outside often enough’, and takes the reader out into a world of birds, animals, clouds and light. ‘Things’ takes us back inside again, mostly, for three pages of, mostly, domestic objects wittily observed. ‘Shudders’ is three pages of computer-related joke-poems. ‘Breath and Air’, the final section, has four longer poems in which birds feature. It includes the killer lines (in ‘Under the filling moon’):
A hundred thousand children at risk and I am writing about birds
Like most of those in the book, the one on page 47* is untitled. It differs by giving clear indications that the three blocks of print are to be read as a single poem in three parts.
Exactly how they constitute a single poem isn’t straightforward.
On first reading section i, I expected to following sections to clarify who they are who ‘rise like ghosts’ – birds, perhaps, or moths? And section ii seemed to be heading that way with its wings and beaks – ah, it’s birds. But section iii puts the kibosh on that, being definitely about insects.
My initial expectation having been thwarted, I take a pleasurable moment to sit with the poem, to simply enjoy its three images and let any connections arise. I have to suppress the impulse to figure out, even nail down, what the poet had in mind, but I’m gradually learning what critics of contemporary poetry mean when they say that it’s the reader’s job to create meaning in a poem as much as it is the poet’s. (Or sometimes, they say, the job of a number of readers collaborating: so feel free to say something in the comments section.)
i. they rise like ghosts or gauzy angels against charcoal
This vividly evokes white and fluttering things taking to the air at night. (I get the whiteness from ‘like ghosts’, and the fluttering from the sound of ‘ghosts / or gauzy’, and of course they have the wings of angels.) It doesn’t identify them. While that creates a kind of puzzle for the reader, it’s not the main effect. It’s more like an invitation to reflect on the image, to bring your own experience to bear on it, or to let it do the work, calling up images from your mind. It gives the reader room to reflect.
I saw moths, but then:
ii. spread wings agitate cooling air beaks pierce night
The strong sound of ‘spread wings’ contrasts with the flutteriness of the first section, and the night-piercing beaks make it clear that these are not the same creatures. Perhaps the poem is simply turning its attention to a new subject, a new image, something else the poet sees as night falls. But there’s something purposeful about these birds, their wings and beaks. I catch a hint that they are swooping to prey on the moths, swallows perhaps, and now I can’t read the lines any other way.
The third section, at first a jarring contrast to the observations of nature that precede it, now fits.
iii. summer glut insects smearing windscreens
The subject is still the death of insects, but the language of economics (‘glut’) and technology (‘windscreens’) intrudes. It’s a very different death from the targeted killing by hungry birds – it’s now happening on an industrial scale, and it’s soulless, collateral damage. And is it just me, or is there an edge of nostalgia here? Having insects smeared on a windscreens used to be a feature of long-distance drives in the country. In my experience this is no longer so. The summer glut is a thing of the past. This is not just death of individual insects, but the wiping out of populations. The poem has moved from a gentle observation of insect and bird life to a deep sorrow about the state of the world. Or at least it has moved me in that way.
I love this book. You can flip it open at any page and find something to smile at or mull on.
I wrote this blog post on unceded Wulgurukaba land, Yunbenun, where yesterday I met a family of five red-tailed black cockatoos, gorgeous and unafraid. I acknowledge Elders past and present who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78. The last poem in Bitumen Psalms finishes on page 75, so my personal algorithm sends me to page 47 (I was born in 1947).
I was quite a few pages into Un Lun Dun before I realised it’s a children’s book. It’s wonderfully fast-paced. It’s witty, endlessly inventive, full of surprising plot twists, respectful of young readers and welcoming to old ones. I had a great time from start to finish. I’d say China Miéville did too, and so would any 10 or 11 year old with the stamina for a 521 page novel and a taste for the scary fantastic.
UnLondon – like Parisn’t, No York and other abcities – exists alongside its real-world equivalent. It’s mostly constructed from garbage and discarded objects that have crossed over. Broken umbrellas are particularly significant. The citizens of UnLondon are a motley lot, not all of them completely human. They are threatened by the Smog, a sentient noxious cloud that feeds on smoke and pollutants, can break up into smoglets and possess the living and the dead. Aided by its greedy or power-hungry humanish accomplices, it plans to take over UnLondon and, later, the world. There are smombies, binjas, stink-junkies, a doughnut-shaped sun and any number of weird creatures and buildings, many of them not only described but lovingly illustrated in ink drawings by the author.
Into this situation wander young Zanna and her friend Deeba. Zanna is hailed as the Shwazzy, which we learn is a phonetic representation of the French choisie. A prophetic book foretells she will defeat the Smog. But, mercifully for the enjoyability of the novel, the book is thoroughly unreliable (much to its own regret, because of course the book can talk).
At page 78* things are just warming up, but even on this one page a gallery of characters is on display and there’s plenty of colour and movement.
Let me take you through it.
As his skin touched the metal, there was a loud crack. An arc of sparks raced down the metal into the big man’s hand. He jerked and flew back, landing on his back, dazed and shaking. His false beard was smoking.
The skin belongs to Jones, an UnLondon bus conductor. Naturally, he also conducts electricity, and here he sends an elecric shock into the sword wielded by a big, bearded man who is attempting to abduct Zanna.
Jones shook his finger: there was a single drop of blood where he had pricked it. He checked Obaday’s head. ‘He’ll be alright,’ he said to Skool.
Jones has injured his finger by touching the tip of the bearded man’s sword. Along with Jones and a milk carton called Curdle, Obaday and Skool are Zanna and Deeba’s companions. Obaday, who wears clothes made of paper and has pins instead of hair, has been knocked unconscious on page 77. The silent Skool, Obaday’s friend and constant companion, is invisible inside a deep-sea diver’s suit. (The meaning of Skool’s name is to be revealed in the final battle scene.)
‘It was that Hemi!’ Zanna said. ‘We saw him in the market.’ ‘He was upstairs,’ said Deeba. ‘He was looking through the ceiling . . .’ ‘He must’ve jumped on just as we set off,’ said Jones. ‘Maybe he was the lookout for this charmer.’ He pointed at the still-shuddering attacker. ‘That went a bit wrong, then, didn’t it?’ He took handfuls of cord and ribbon from Obaday’s paper pockets. ‘Tie him up!’ Jones shouted, and several passengers obeyed. ‘I dunno,’ said Deeba doubtfully. ‘Didn’t look like that to me . . .’ Jones looked around. ‘Well, he’s gone now, straight through the floor. Keep an eye out, alright?’ Deeba and Zanna were looking about avidly, but Hemi was gone.
Hemi is a boy who approached our heroines when they first arrived in UnLondon. He seemed friendly, but they were warned that he was a ghost boy who wanted to steal their bodies. This, is turns out much later, was only partly true. But they fled from him and now they realise that he has followed them onto the flying bus, and has somehow passed down through the ceiling of the lower deck and then out through the floor. Hemi is an ambiguious figure at this stage of the story – as Deeba’s doubts about Jones’s narrative remind us.
But Hemi and the man with the sword must now wait because the bus is being attacked by a grossbottle, a giant fly, with a platform on its back carrying a gang of heavily armed airwaymen and airwaywomen.
‘We’ll deal with that later. Have to focus now. That grossbottle’s coming. As quick as you can, stay down and hold on. Rosa! Evasion!’
Rosa is the bus driver.
The bus veered, pitched and accelerated. Passengers shrieked. Jones hooked a leg around the pole and leaned out, notching an arrow into his bow. With a growl of wings the grossbottle came close. Jones fired. His arrows thwacked into the fly’s disgusting great eyes and disappeared inside. The insect buzzed angrily but did not slow. The men and women it carried aimed a collection of motley guns. Their faces were ferocious.
And so it goes.
There is an army of unbrellas, an infestation of Black Widows in Webminster Cathedral, a shadowy organisation called the Concern that sees the Smog’s attack as a commercial opportunity, a diabolical link between the Smog and the UK government. Things are rarely what they seem. Expectations are always met but rarely in the way you expect.
What’s not to like?
I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, the luxuriant island of Yunbenun, and have finished it with the tropical sun warming my back. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Before the meeting: The Book Group’s designated chooser defied recent practice and chose a long book – 624 pages in my edition. I doggedly put in the time, and had read the book well before the meeting, only to realise that I was away from home on the night and couldn’t be there.
The club of the title is a group of exiles in 1950s Paris who meet in the back room of a bistro, mostly to play chess but also to share news of their homelands, and to argue fiercely about love, politics and life in general. One of the two main strands of the book is made up of their stories. Mostly they are without ID, even stateless refugees or defectors from the Soviet Union. One has actually been a friend of Stalin’s, who defected for love but remains faithful to the Soviet cause. The rest are dissidents or men (they are all men) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jean-Paul Sartre is a member and kind of patron, though after a riveting scene in which he registers news of Camus’ death, he pretty much fades from the narrative.
We see the club and its members through the eyes of Michel Marini, a schoolboy who first visits the cafe to play desktop football (whose French name, ‘baby-foot’, trand). His coming of age story, against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence, is the other main narrative strand. Michel befriends Cécile, the girlfriend of his older brother, Frank. Frank bunks off to fight in Algeria, then disappears, only to reappear as a fugitive. Cécile calls Michel ‘little bro’, and neither she nor he realise that he is completely in love with her. Meanwhile, Michel’s parents’ marriage goes through tumultuous times.
It’s never dull, richly political and just as rich in its focus on the storms of adolescence. Yet the blurb describes it as a debut novel. Could this possibly be the work of a young person? I went looking and found that it’s not. According to Wikipedia, Jean-Michel Guenassia is almost as old as me, and was 59 when the book was published. He had in fact previously published one novel, and three TV screenplays and some plays had been produced. The Incorrigible Optimists Club is another example of an overnight sensation that was years in the making.
Euan Cameron’s English version is smooth, lively and engrossing.
Page 78* highlights elements of the book that didn’t feature in that quick overview. But they’re qualities that are important to the way the book draws the reader into the warm embrace of its imagined time and place.
We’re still getting to know Michel before he becomes involved with the Incorrigible Optimists, before the realities of the Algerian War intrude into his life, before his parents’ relationship becomes fully hostile. His father, a small businessman, has just bought a flash car – a DS 19 – and takes it for a spin with Michel in the passenger seat:
After a rough start, the car behaves like a midlife-crisis dream come true. We’ve been told that Michel’s father loves to impersonate the cool screen actors of the day, and that he is more or less despised by his wife’s upper-class parents, including Grandfather Philippe mentioned here. This paragraph reminds us of that tension, shows him having fun with his son, and at the same time fleshes out the soundtrack of the era. This kind of detail is what brings the narrative alive, even for readers (like me) who have vague to nonexistent knowledge of he singers and actors mentioned:
My father was the happiest man in the world. He began making fun of Grandfather Philippe, adopting the cheeky, mocking accent of Jean Gabin, whom he imitated wonderfully. I burst out laughing, and the more I laughed, the more he carried on. I was given the full repertory of Pierre Fresnay, Michel Simon and Tino Rossi. I had tears in my eyes. He switched on the radio. We were treated to a Brassens song. We took up the chorus: _ Les amoureux qui s’bécotent sur les bancs publics, bancs publics, _ bancs publics ont des p’tites gueules bien sympathiques.
Jean Gabin played Maigret in 1958. Pierre Fresnay was the suave Frenchman in La Grande Illusion. Michel Simon was described by Charlie Chaplin as the greatest actor in the world. Tino Rossi, like the others that Michel’s father impersonates, was feted as a film actor who supported the Resistance. Even without all the googling, you can tell that this is a moment when father and son are enjoying each other and loving life, singing together, and celebrating an anti-Fascist strand of French culture.
Here’s a YouTube of George Brassens singing ‘Les amoureux des bancs publiques’. The words don’t really matter, but they translate as ‘The lovers who kiss on public benches, public benches, public benches, have very friendly little mouths.’
Then there’s this:
On Christmas evening, my father had arranged a surprise for me. He took me to the Opéra de Paris. Since he had only had the idea at the las moment, he had paid a fortune for tickets at an agency. He dressed up for the occasion, and when I arrived in my creased suit, he looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Haven’t you got anything else to put on? We’re going to the Opéra.’ “It’s all I’ve got.’ ‘I’m going to tell your mother to buy you some things. Come on, we’re going to be late.’ We found ourselves in the upper circle, at the side. Despite his protests, I let him sit in the proper seat. I took the folding one. You had to dislocate your neck to get a view of the stage. The Opéra was packed, the women in evening gowns and the men in dinner jackets. He was excited. Even the programme was exorbitant. ‘Your grandfather would have given anything to see Rigoletto.’
This time Michel doesn’t share his father’s enthusiasm. The tiny incident, especially coming on the heels of the singing together with Georges Brassens, shows us the mutual affecrtion between father and son, as well as the distance that is growing between the generations, both of which become hugely important when the father disapproves of things done by Michel’s brother Frank but makes enormous sacrifices for him.
After the meeting: Sadly, I wasn’t there.
I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, the luxuriant island of Yunbenun, where cockatoos screech during the day and curlews serenade the night. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
A couple of mornings ago, I opened my letterbox to find an envelope stamped with a profile of King Charles and evidence that someone had paid £4.30 postage to send it to me. It felt like a book, but I hadn’t ordered anything from the UK, and I couldn’t think of anyone over there who might be sending me one. When I opened the envelope and pulled out this slim volume, I was no less bemused. Then, tucked inside the front cover, I found a plain white card:
The man who wrote that, I thought, is a real poet.
Published by The Bodily Press, a small publisher in Amherst, Massachusetts, Concrete is a collection of 26 short, even tiny poems. John Phillips, according to his bio, hails originally from Cornwall and now lives in Slovenia. I can only imagine that he has come across my blog and just wanted me to read his poetry. Somehow the gesture, being ‘out of the blue’ didn’t feel like a request for a review but a friendly offer of connection.
What I want to say about the book is that I enjoyed it! The poems are so short that mostly to quote from one would be to quote all of it. Each of them is like a small huddle of words in the middle of white space, and the meaning of the poem is in the space as much as in the words.
It’s worth noting a feature of the book’s design. Many of the poems have individual dedications, most of them to people I assume are the poet’s friends but some to familiar names like Zbigniev Herbert or Giuseppe Ungaretti. But rather appearing with the poems, these dedications are relegated to a list at the back of the book, leaving the poems themselves to sit on the page clean and uncluttered.
The form perfectly embodies the sense, as most of the poems are about the limits of language, and / or the importance of silence.
The poem on page 15, ‘SAY’, is a good example:
It’s a poem that makes me want to read it aloud a number of times. Once just for the sound of it. Once, wondering if it’s complete nonsense. Once for the image of the word’s truth staying on the tongue while the word itself, vibrating airwaves, goes out into the world. Once for the pun in ‘lies’. Once to see if I can keep those last two readings in mind at the same time. Once paying attention to the line break after ‘lies’. Once more, taking the poem’s title as an instruction, listening to how my reading aloud relates to my silent reading.
And I end up with a mind full of questions about the connection between thought and speech, speech and silence, written and spoken words, reality and language. Ten simple words in four lines, and a rich moment of silence. What’s not to like?
[John, if you read this, please let me know your land address and I’ll send you a copy of my own chapbook, None of Us Alone. I only have one, compared to your own impressive list of publications.]
I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia in song and story.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78. The last poem in this book is on page 34. I’ve stuck with arbitrariness and gone for page 8+7.
Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 256 (Spring 2024) (Links are to the online versions unless otherwise indicated.)
This is the third of four promised editions of Overland dedicated to commemorating its 70th year. In some ways it marks the end of an era as Toby Fitch, who has been poetry editor for a decade, breaks his silence with ‘A farewell and a poem from poetry editor Toby Fitch, 2015–2025‘, and resigns from the ‘simple work, of carving down a cornucopia of submissions into a small set menu for each issue’.
There is an element of nostalgia in the design and the illustrations reproduced from past issues – by artists including Fred Williams (from 1985), Ian Rankin (from 1987) and Richard Tipping (from 1993). The writing by contrast tends more to the urgent.
‘Plant hatred in our hearts‘ by Sarah Wehbe, ‘the child of refugees who are the children of refugees’, contextualises the current atrocities in Gaza by listing events reported from there in the first week of the writer’s life. The essay includes this, a reminder of Edward Said’s resonant statement that ‘Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate’:
The recent genocide in Gaza has planted hatred in the hearts of its survivors and onlookers, a painful wound so immense that it will continue to throb generations on. Plant hatred in our hearts and watch as hope and resilience grow in its place. Long after the rubble has settled and the refugees have dispersed across the world, we will share our stories. … We are here, we tell our stories, and as long as that is true, there is hope.
There’s a lot else besides. ‘Dust‘ by Lilli Hayes is a brief, harrowing first-hand account of the impact of asbestos-related mesothelioma on her family. In ‘Résonances‘, Daniel Browning – whose book of essays Close to the Subject won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award – writes about the work of Swiss–Haitian artist Sasha Huber, as seen through an Australian First Nations lens.
There is more poetry than usual (Toby is going out in a blaze of glory). There are some big names, but I’ll just mention ‘speed, a pastoral‘ by Ruby Connor, which has a subtitle ‘(After John Forbes)‘. It doesn’t feel very Forbes-ish to me, but it captures an episode in a young woman’s life in vivid, unpunctuated three-line stanzas.
My page 78* practice serves me well with this Overland. It falls in the middle of one of the three pieces selected by fiction editor Claire Corbett, the masterly ‘Daryl’s wombat farm‘ by Rowan MacDonald.
The image gives you an idea of the retro design – the chunky type face and larger font size, and the plain white, matt paper stock. I don’t necessarily prefer this to the modern design, but the larger font is a relief to my ageing eyes, and the poorer paper stock creates a companionable vibe rather than an austerely professional one.
I know I said there’s not much nostalgia in the writing in this Overland. I’ll now contradict myself. This story reminds me solid, social realist, working-class fiction that was a staple of Australian short fiction decades ago. I hasten to add that it does it in a good way.
At the start the narrator, wearing his girlfriend Chloe’s pink gumboots, is shovelling cube-shaped wombat poo. What grows from there is a portrait of a small, marginalised rural community filled with histories of violence, untimely death, ‘unspoken stories’, and a cast of characters who are known only by their first names and vague reference to their status, exploits or fates. Within that portrait is the sweet, elliptically told story of fatherhood.
When I say elliptically-told, I mean it sometimes take a bit of pleasurable work to figure out what’s going on. The beginning of page 78 is an example. The narrator has just returned Curly’s borrowed Skyline (a make of car – my four-year-old grandson would be ashamed of me that I had to look it up) with mess on the seats. Curly, who hasn’t been mentioned previously, doesn’t make a fuss about the mess. Instead he says, ‘Congrats, brother. You’re one of us now.’ Only as the first sentences of page 78 unreel, the reader understands. Curly has played a good role in the narrator’s life in other ways than lending the car, and his ‘one of us’ refers to fatherhood. The narrator has borrowed the car when Chloe was in labour, but didn’t make it to the hospital in time:
I’m relieved he doesn’t mention the seats, instead welcoming me to an unspoken club. He got me a gig on the council road crew — fewer potholes between here and the hospital now.
On the rest of the page, the aftermath of the birth plays out and a number of economically sketched subplots are resolved. The narrator catches himself voicing some of Chloe’s hippie-book-derived philosophy. He has an oblique conversation with his mother about breaking the pattern of neglect and abuse set by his father. Daryl of the wombat farm gets a degree of justice for his role in the narrator’s father’s death. The mother of a missing boy overcomes her dislike of libraries and education enough to put posters back up. Maureen, mentioned once before in connection with pavs, gets another mention. A wedding is mooted. And there’s a tiny, beautifully pitched conversation about the future.
Chloe did great. I knew she would. It wasn’t ideal but life rarely is. You learn to roll with the punches. Promise I haven’t been into those hippie books. This stuff just changes you, does something to how one sees the world. Never thought I’d see you in church,’ laughs Mum, when we arrive at the baptism. ‘Must do everything right,’ I tell her. ‘About time someone did.’ Daryl doesn’t attend. He’s back inside, doing time for perverting the course of justice. Had to sell his farm. Tourism developers snapped it up. Rumour says it will be a wildlife sanctuary – has enough wombats already. Billy Kerslake’s mother did the catering for us. She’s turned over a new leaf. She put up posters of Billy in the library again, says the place isn’t so bad, after she discovered their Women’s Weekly cookbooks. Now her pavs give Maureen’s a run for their money. ‘Do you have a date?’ asks Mum, eager for our wedding. She’s given up the smokes, says she wants to be around to see her grandchild grow up. ‘Once we’re settled,’ I assure her. ‘You’ll be first invited.’ Chloe and I walk the beach each day. I push the pram while she collects seashells. ‘Think I might attend a craft course,’ she says. ‘With the mums from post-natal class.’ She never ceases to amaze me.
The story could end there, really, but it continues for another 75 words, and concludes on an explicitly optimistic note that sings:
We hold our baby girl, smile in awe at this creation, the love we share, an unwritten future ahead. ‘Thank you,’ I say to Chloe. ‘What for?’ she laughs.
It’s a story that repays the closer attention that my page 78 practice requires.
I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and lived through extraordinary changes in the land and climate over that time.
* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.
A friend told me about this book: ‘A man dies in Brisbane leaving a note that he wants his body to be taken to Innisfail to be buried. When his relatives ignore the note, his dead body rises from the grave and walks there.’
My friend’s description of the book omitted a couple of key points. The man who dies, Stephen Bolin, is mixed race Chinese, and the note that he leaves asks not just that his body be taken to Innisfail, but that it be strapped to two bamboo poles and then carried there by his sisters, one at either end of the poles. The other key thing my friend didn’t mention is that interspersed with the story of the reanimated corpse’s journey is the history of his family, beginning with his great grandfather Tam Bo Lin on the North Queensland goldfields.
The book progresses in alternate chapters.
The family history chapters progress by leaps and bounds. Tam Bo Lin marries an Irish woman who decides that his personal name, ‘Bo Lin’, will become their family name, ‘Bolin’ (‘First name second name,’ she says, pointing to the marriage papers). After many years he is kicked out of the marital home when his wife discovers that he has been sending money to a wife back in China, married before he came to Australia. His descendants live through Federation, the World Wars, the Depression, the Bjelke-Petersen era and the coming of Pauline Hanson, mostly marry non-Chinese partners, and over the generations they become less and less comfortable in their Chinese heritage. Stephen, who is to become the walking corpse, is a Gay man who hates what he sees as the fetishing of Asian bodies – of his body seen as Asian.
The corpse’s chapters, each titled ‘Jiāngshī’, are told from the corpse’s point of view. He has an irresistible drive to continue walking north, even as his body is decaying, and bits fall off, or are nipped off by a dog or eaten away by worms and insects. Every now and then he is compelled to leap on a living person and suck their life force from them. A couple of chapters in, I googled “Jiāngshī”, and found an ancient Chinese tradition of ‘hopping vampires’ that has inspired a genre of modern books and movies in Hong Kong and elsewhere. I haven’t read or seen any of those works, but I doubt if any of them depict the Jiāngshī as unwilling, agonising characters like Stephen, who takes absolutely no joy from his condition and only dimly understands it.
As the family history approaches the present and Stephen’s corpse nears Innisfail, a question arises: what does it all mean?
Of course, as zombie filmmaker George Romero said, ‘Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie,’ or he may have said, ‘A zombie is always just a zombie.’ (If you can find the actual quote please tell me in the comments.) Sure, a jiāngshī is also just a jiāngshī. It’s hard enough being compelled to walk a thousand miles while dead without having to mean something. All the same, as I read on, a number of metaphorical possibilities hung over the narrative. As a Gay man who had cut ties with his family to live first in Sydney then in London, Stephen as a corpse is compelled to do what his living self needed to do at some deep, unacknowledged level, and reconcile himself with his family, in this case symbolised by the place of his birth. Maybe, stretching it, as a settler Australian he has been deeply influenced by First People’s sense of the importance of Country. Maybe, stretching it in another direction, anyone who comes from Innisfail in particular can’t resist its call, living or dead. Or – and this metaphor is spelled out in the final chapter – having wanted so much to pass as white, he now must return to the Innisfail joss house and be reclaimed by his Chineseness. (Incidentally, the joss house, lovingly described in the relevant chapter as the somewhat neglected building I remember from my 1950s childhood, has been restored in real life and has a notice out the front asking that we not call it a joss house but ‘the Innisfail Temple’. It has a website.)
If you picked up a copy in a bookshop and turned to page 78*, you would have no idea you were looking at a zombie-adjacent genre novel. William in this extract is Tam Bo Lin’s son, Stephen’s grandfather. Christina, née Lo, is perhaps the only other Chinese heritage person a Bolin has married.
The chapter begins like all the family history chapters, with the year, and like all the chapters evokes the period and the place with a deft touch:
1938
On the wide dirt road known as Ernest Street, Innisfail, William and Christina Bolin’s house sat like an umpire’s stand, watching over a game of rounders. It was after 3 pm. School was out. When the Bolins and their cousins the Los and a couple of ring-ins got together, it was intense. Eighteen kids under the age of eight, with at least six cousins per team. Barefoot and without hats. The summer had been hot. Everyone was burnt brown except for the fair-haired ring-ins, who were pink and peeling. Swinging the one bat they had at the one ball they owned, they smashed it into the allotment over the road. Whoever had the bat raced around the bases. Meanwhile, the chasers went for the ball and got scratches on legs and arms from the Guinea grass. Every so often a tick found its way into their hair to attach itself to their scalp. Willie Bolin had just found one on his head. He ran to his mother, Christina, who kept tweezers in her pocket just for that. With a dab of kerosene, she dislodged it. The tick freed its jaws, maddened by the kerosene. Christina nipped it between her tweezers and held it to the light to identify its species.
You don’t need to come from Innisfail to enjoy this, but it helps. Ernest Street is still a wide road now, part of the main north-south highway. Guinea grass is an invasive weed in North Queensland, which we used to call blady grass – I have stories about those scratches. Rounders, a poor relation of baseball, was played by the young at least as much as cricket. I would have thought ticks in the hair were less likely than on other parts of the body in those circumstances, but ticks were still an issue, if not on Ernest Street, in the 1950s.
Willy, seen here running to his mother, will fall in love with a white woman and marry her in spite of her abusive father’s racist opposition. He becomes manager of a department store in Proserpine further south, a domineering father deeply disappointed in his effeminate son Stephen.
The page gives you a sense of the quiet, assured story of the family. Add gruesome undead action and who could resist?
I was born and spent my first 13 years on beautiful Ma:Mu country. I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation,. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of both countries, never ceded.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
I’m more than a bit in love with Ken Bolton’s poetry, but I was at a loss what to write about Metropole without in effect repeating what I’d said about his three previous books that I’ve read (you can see those blog posts here, here and here).
Then I saw a headline on the Overland website: ‘The trouble Ken Bolton’s poems make for me, specifically, at the moment’ by Linda Marie Walker. Ah, I thought, someone who hates his poetry! Maybe they’ll point out ingrained misogyny or other cancellable qualities. Someone I can get into an argument with!
No such luck. The article is a very funny account of how Linda Marie Walker has enjoyed three of Bolton’s poems – where the word ‘enjoyed’ has complex meanings. All three poems she discusses appear in Metropole. Her ‘trouble’ with Bolton is partly summed up in this sentence:
These poems are, for me only, perhaps, enormous art museums with small and hopeful labels beside the works, just tempting enough to turn me into a rabbit sitting beside a trap at the mouth of the burrow/hole.
It’s not only you, Linda Marie.
So, rather than someone to fight with, I found someone who can describe the pleasures of these poems infinitely more satisfyingly than I can.
So I’ll stick with page 78*, which is the 12th of 14 pages of the poem ‘A Misty Day in Late July, 2020’, and has its own small and hopeful labels. It’s a Covid poem – specifically, according to one of Bolton’s delightful endnotes, Covid ‘as experienced by Adelaide: a “phoney war” situation as the city at the time remained relatively disease-free’.
The first lines of this page will seem melodramatic when presented without what has gone before:
True.
But must I die – must I die yet?
You could read the preceding pages as designed to blunt the force of that question. They have circled the subject of the Covid pandemic – describing family activities and a richly metaphorical fog on Bruny Island, quoting an ‘unflappable’ writer in the London Review of Books, remembering friends who have died long ago, and referring to movies and TV shows of tangential relevance. Somehow the poem arrives at the 1970s WWII TV series The Sullivans, and Bolton/the speaker remembers that ‘the Sullivans’
_____________________ _______________ became appropriately, a name for Australians
or Anglo types ... as used by Indigenous Aussies ... or Greeks & Italians
He supposes he is ‘one of them’ and says he ‘must die a Sullivan’. Almost by accident, it seems, he has explicitly acknowledged the prospect of his own death – and the stark threat from Covid is momentarily present.
True.
But must I die – must I die yet?
The rest of the page is a lovely example of the way Bolton’s poetry fizzes with allusion. (I’m reminded of a favourite line from Martin Johnston: ‘Even my compassion reeks of libraries.’) First, in recoiling from the thought that Covid might kill him, expresses the recoil by quoting from an old movie:
& now I say, Rick, Rick, you’ve got to save me (Peter Lorre)
That’s from Casablanca, which has been mentioned earlier in the poem because of the fog. I went down that little rabbit hole to watch the scene on YouTube. The actual line is, ‘You must help me, Rick. (Then, as he is being dragged away) Rick! Rick!’ This is not an academic exercise where the quote needs to be exact – the line is quoted as it sits in the poet’s memory.
It turns out that the quote is a bridge back to safe ground. Mention one classic story, and the mind can go to another, and at the comfortable remove provided by sales figures. He also finds reassurance by putting ‘in a big way’ in minimising quote marks:
Camus' The Plague has been selling well, since the pandemic got started, (or got started 'in
a big way').
And then he’s away, play on associations with the foggy scene outside.
a big way'). And – since then – I think 'Mediterranean France', 'Nice', 'Marseilles'
(& see images of sweeping, empty coastal roads curving round a bay)
(Matisse might have worked here)
An image based on a mixture of ... what towns? – Trieste, Wellington, the Cannes of To Catch a Thief, Hvar –
Bolton is well-travelled. I haven’t been to Trieste, hadn’t heard of Hvar, and have to do a bit of mental calisthenics to see what Wellington and the Cannes of To Catch a Thief have in common – I guess it’s the coastal roads and steep hillsides. A reader could get hung up on not knowing the town referred to, or wondering about Matisse landscapes (and I did just google “Matisse landscapes”). The effect, though, is to find distraction / refuge / escape (?) – the poem’s speaker has travelled in his mind to faraway places, to works of art.
In the last lines on the page, he progresses in his escapist reverie from an image, to an atmosphere, to a scenario. In the final couplet, death again shoulders its way into the picture, to be turned away from in a whiplash switch to images from the old movies:
– where a killer might've killed someone, where women wore high shoulders & calf-length dresses
When I read the poem for the first time, I confess I just went with the flow, enjoying the back and forth of image and allusion, picturing Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in their convertible on the Corniche. Only reading it now with hands on the keyboard, I can go some way to articulating what’s happening. The final lines of this poem, two pages further on, make new sense to me:
The West has invented some great glass-bead games
& I have been a sucker for all of them
Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is another classic work I haven’t read. According to Wikipedia, the game ‘is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences’ which ‘proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics’. Not a bad description of what happens in Bolton’s poetry in general, and this one in particular. But Bolton doesn’t present himself as a polymath champion of the game. Polymath he may be, but that just makes him a sucker.
This is poetry that cries out for a collaborative reading. Or maybe it’s me that’s crying out – not ‘you’ve got / to save me’ but ‘come and enjoy this with me!’
I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, as the days are starting to get longer, and the banksia are in flower. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their millennial long, and 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 78.
Me fail? I fly! 