Winter reads 9: Richard James Allen’s Text Messages from the Universe

Posted on 24 Aug 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my ninth and last post on books I took with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. I’ve been home for a while, but it takes a while for the blog to catch up with life.

Richard James Allen, Text Messages from the Universe (Flying Island Books 2023)

Like the other titles in Flying Island’s ‘minor works / Pocket Poets’ series, Text Messages from the Universe is a physically tiny book – just 152 x 102 mm. But it’s part of a broader multi-media project.

There’s a movie of the same name directed by Richard James Allen, which is the source of the lavish images of dancing figures that accompany the text (or perhaps, depending on how you see things, that are accompanied by the text). The front cover is from a painting created for the book by 2023 Archibald finalist Michelle Hiscock. The text itself, a single prose poem, is the final work in the multi-volume The Way Out At Last Cycle, which has been three decades in the making (Hale & Ironmonger published The Way Out At Last and other poems in 1985).

The poem is inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The first, shorter section is addressed to a person who dies in a car accident. In the second section, made up of 49 short parts, the person is lost in a state between death and rebirth, the bardo, in a cycle of dreaming and waking, bewildered, disoriented and panicking. The poetry takes on a weirdly insubstantial quality that is beautifully enhanced by the billowing drapery of the dancers on every page. I haven’t read the Tibetan Book of the Dead – that part of 1960s enthusiasm passed me by – so I don’t know if the poem follows it with any precision, but there’s a wonderful sense of being carried along on a current leading to detached oblivion and then, perhaps, to a new beginning.

No spoiler intended, but the text messages of the title are revealed towards the end of the poem, in part 46: ‘This is your last moment,’ closely followed by, ‘This is your first moment.’ Part 47 adds this gloss:

As for the rest, Your text messages from the universe 
seem to be happy to take any form and any language 
they please.

Some of them aren't even text messages, just 
whispers inside your head.

Speaking as someone who is currently reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, I’d add they may also come in the form of a child chanting on the other side of a wall.

Even while I’m enjoying the poem’s journey in an invented universe (apologies to any of my readers for whom the bardo is as real as purgatory is to some Catholics), my tendency as a reader is to cast around for the kind of actual experience that the invention draws on and possibly illuminates. The short poem on page 76, section 36, rewards this tendency:

(36)
A ragged poster floats by in 
the gutter. The people inside 
are the beautiful people.
They are living the there life.
They have made it.

Whereas, you feel like 
you are never really there.
Even when you are there.

Incidentally, this is the only image in the book where the dancer is less than elegant, where the fabric is not floating in an ethereal breeze. It signals that, as so often happens, page 76 is a kind of turning point, in this case a low point.

The text offers one of the poem’s many noir-ish images – one of many alleys, gutters and empty lots. The poster is a piece of detritus from the life left behind. In the dream world of the poem, it asserts the substantiality of that life, its thereness. These lines reward my penchant for literalness by drawing on a moment of a kind I imagine we’ve all had: you see a poster for some event and reflect fleetingly that the life represented in the poster is unreal – either that, or it’s part of a reality that you have no part of. This is the moment in the bardo when the newly-dead person is closest to nothingness: it’s the rubbish poster that’s real.

In the years that this poem was fermenting, the bardo attracted the attention of a number of other creators. I’m aware of George Saunders’s multivocal novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which I haven’t read, and Laurie Anderson’s movie Heart of a Dog (2015), for which I just couldn’t stay awake. I had no trouble staying awake on the journey with Text Messages from the Universe.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Text Messages from the Universe.

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The Confessions of Saint Augustine, second report

Posted on 20 Aug 2023 | 7 comments

Saint Augustine, Confessions (approx 400 CE, translated by R S Pine-Coffin 1961, Penguin Classics edition): pages 111–190, from start of Book VI to Book IX, chapter 6

This month’s reading of Confessions included the book’s most famous prayer, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ Here it is in context:

As a youth I had been woefully at fault, particularly in early adolescence. I had prayed to you for chastity and said, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid that you would answer my prayer at once and cure me too soon from the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled.
at ego adulescens miser valde, miserior in exordio ipsius adulescentiae, etiam petieram a te castitatem et dixeram: da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo. timebam enim, ne me cito exaudires et cito sanares a morbo concupiscentiae, quem malebam expleri quam exstingui. 

(Book VIII Chapter 7, page 169)

Interestingly enough, Augustine’s struggle with sexual desire isn’t his main story. He does go on about it a bit, and he never shakes off the Manichees’ demonising of the body, but it’s not that much more interesting than his gambling addiction, which was relatively easily kicked. His true interest is in the convoluted mental and emotional process of conversion. He disentangles himself from Manicheism, comes to devalue academic success, and renounces what we might see as a perfectly decent de facto relationship, to embrace mainstream Christianity. He describes himself as wanting to go in two directions, one towards what he understands to be a life well lived, and the other to stay with what he has. It’s a beautiful anatomy of the process of getting to decide to change one’s life (‘a hundred indecisions, … a hundred visions and revisions’).

The moment when he finally makes his decision is brilliant. He is overwhelmed by an emotional storm, an ‘agony of indecision’, and goes away from his friend to weep, because ‘tears were best shed in solitude’ (so men’s conditioning has stayed constant in some regards for at least 1600 years). He has a really good cry, and then there’s the other bit I was told about in my childhood::

I heard the singsong voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain ‘Take it and read, take it and read’. At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall.
audio vocem de vicina domo cum cantu dicentis, et crebro repentenis, quasi pueri an puellae, nescio: tolle lege, tolle lege. statimque mutato vultu intentissimus cogitare coepi, utrumnam solerent pueri in aliquo genere ludendi cantitare tale aliquid, nec occurebat omnino audisse me uspiam: repressoque impetu lacrimarum surrexi, nihil aliud interpretans divinitus mihi iuberi, nisi ut aperirem codicem et legerem quod primum caput invenissem.

(Book VIII chapter 12, page 177)

I got the impression from the nuns, priests and brothers of long ago that the voice was that of a disembodied spirit, an angel. But Augustine himself suggests no such thing. God’s instrument here is an actual child – otherwise why linger on the child’s indeterminate gender? I also thought this was the first time Augustine read the Christian scriptures, but he has been studying them for years, and already believes they are sound. In the actual Confessions, this is a moment of serendipity, and his going to read the first passage he sees (from Paul’s epistles, it turns out) has a lot in common with the ‘pagan’ practice of the sortes Virgilianae, in which the pages of Virgil’s Aeneid were opened at random to see the future.

This morning’s reading ended with more tears, of gladness this time as he is baptised and his life is turned around. He is accompanied by his son Adeodatus, now 15 years old, whom he clearly treasures.

I’m about two thirds of the way through the book, and I’m expecting the rest to be pious anticlimax. But these last 20 pages are brilliant and completely explain the book’s enduring status as a classic.

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Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood, Youth, Dependency and the Book Group

Posted on 17 Aug 2023 | 3 comments

Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood, Youth, Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy, 1968–1971 (Penguin 2020)
First two books translated by Tiina Nunnally 1985; the third by Michael Favala Goldman 2009

Before the meeting: In January this year as part of a series of belated obituaries, The New York Times published an article on Tove Ditlevsen, 47 years after her death. You can read the whole thing at this link (you might have to sign up for a free account to get access).

The short version: Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was one of Denmark’s most popular authors. Her published works included 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four story collections, as well as the three short memoirs, Childhood (Barndom in Danish), Youth (Ungdom) and Dependency (Gift) that have been collected here as The Copenhagen Trilogy. She didn’t enjoy critical success during her lifetime and was virtually unknown outside Denmark. None of her books of poetry were translated into English. Then in 2016 translator Michael Favala Goldman picked up a copy of Gift in an airport, considered it to be a masterpiece, and set the snowball in motion for a critical discovery in the English-speaking world and elsewhere.

I was prompted to go looking for that background by something about the book itself. Perhaps because I’ve recently read two brilliant memoirs by Annie Ernaux (blog posts here and here), not to mention Proust’s vast À la recherche du temps perdu, I felt that the first book (Barndom/Childhood) and much of the second (Ungdom/Youth) were too neat, too confident in their detail to be trusted as memoir.

The first book begins with Ditlevsen as a small child trying unsuccessfully to avoid triggering her mother’s anger, and observing the life of their apartment block. ‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.’ She goes to school, and has an ambivalent relationship with the cool girls who gather at ‘the trash-can corner’. She thinks of herself as unattractive and no one contradicts her. She is hospitalised with diphtheria. She reads a lot and writes poetry that she keeps in a secret album.

In Youth, still living at home, she has a series of terrible jobs, is befriended by the worldly Nina, and enters the world of boys and kissing goodnight at the door. She continues to write and, encouraged by her older brother and Nina, dares to show her poems to a literary gent who offers qualified encouragement of her writing and allows her to borrow from his well stocked bookshelves, then disappears without explanation. Another older man becomes a mentor and publishes one of her poems in his literary journal. She fantasises becoming his wife. At the end of this volume, she has had a book of poems published.

Rather than memoirs, these books read as novelisations of the writer’s early life, and as novels they have an almost generic quality. I was so lulled into thinking of them as fiction that I was taken aback when, in Dependency, Piet Hein turns up as a character. Piet Hein, as you probably know, was a Danish polymath (1905–1996) who wrote little poems he called grooks, of which probably the most famous is

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less.

He was a real person, who would have been known to the book’s first readers at least as well as Ditlevsen herself, and he was very much alive when the book was published. He is portrayed mockingly as a charming but callous serial monogamist. Maybe, I thought, all the other people named – and to varying degrees shamed – were real as well. I did a little duck-duck-going, and sure enough the people given full names mostly did exist. So I’m guessing that part of the books’ original appeal may have been their gossip value – a popular writer was spilling the beans.

In the third book, things get much worse for Tove, and as a result (I’m sorry to confess this of myself as a reader) the book is much more interesting. Its Danish title, Gift, means ‘poison’ but it’s also some form of the word for ‘marriage’. Michael Favala Goldman’s title, Dependency, suggests both Ditlevsen’s approach to marriage and relationships, and her harrowing experience of drug addiction. In this book, Ditlevsen marries, divorces, and has a child with a new lover (not Piet Hein). When she falls pregnant a second time she has an illegal and traumatic abortion, which leads to her first experience of the opioid painkiller Demerol. The book comes fully alive and gripping in the detailed account of the abortion and her subsequent addiction to Demerol. The harrowing process of drying out, relapsing, drying out again, is described with tremendous force.

I’m not sure I needed the first two books, but I was shaken and stirred by the third.

There’s not a lot of lightness – her relationships with men are terrible and mainly explicitly transactional, though (spoiler alert) that changes at the very end. One snippet of literary gossip is an exception that’s worth mentioning as a moment that makes her (and us) realise how grim her life has become in the grip of addiction and of the controlling lover who administers her ‘shots’. It also casts a somewhat benign light on her ambivalence about her children. She accepts a rare invitation to dinner:

During the dinner I sat next to Evelyn Waugh, a small, vibrant, youthful man with a pale face and curious eyes. … Kjeld Abell asked Evelyn Waugh if they had such young and beautiful female authors in England. He said no, and when I asked what brought him to Denmark, he answered that he always took trips around the world when his children were home on vacation from boarding school, because he couldn’t stand them.

(Page 334)

After the meeting: It was a long time between meetings – I wrote the previous paragraphs a couple of months ago – and my memories of the book had faded when at last we met. In the days leading up to the meeting there were ominous rumblings on our WhatsApp group giving advance notice that many group members either disliked the book intensely or couldn’t finish it for reasons other than lack of time. A lone voice said it was brilliant. It was promising to be an interesting evening.

But then, one chap was attacked by an unruly plate-glass door on his way here and had to be taken to a hospital emergency, which would have been bad enough, but the man who drove him to hospital was the book’s main advocate and – I learned later – he himself had just finished the book and thought it was a masterpiece.

Because of the accident itself and the absence of advocacy, discussion was fairly muted. One chap who had also just finished reading the book gave a spirited account of why he loved it (making it three out of 11 definite thumbs up; maybe three definite thumbs-down). He read it quickly. He couldn’t put it down, he said, and then at time he had to put it down. My sense was that a number of people got to the moments when you have to put the book down and just didn’t want to pick it up again – some would say they were lily-livered.

Someone pointed out that a good deal of the action takes place in Denmark occupied by the Germans, and it’s a revelation that for Ditlevsen and her literary pals the occupation was little more than a dark shadow on the edges of their lives.

But it wasn’t long before conversation moved to other pressing matters: the Women’s Football World Cup – the Matilda’s had beaten France, but not yet been defeated by England, and many of us were in love; the Voice referendum, Peter Dutton’s dastardliness and Anthony Albanese’s alleged lack of statesmanship; the mushroom dinner; parental dementia; and far too much food.

No one was interested in my recitation of the above grook.

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Winter reads 8: Sophia Wilson’s Sea Skins

Posted on 14 Aug 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my eight post on books I took with me on my brief escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. (I’ve actually been home for a while, but the blog is still catching up.)

Sophia Wilson, Sea Skins (Flying Island Books 2023)

Sophia Wilson was joint winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets in 2022. Originally from Australia, she now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The poems in this collection reflect her attachment to both countries: there are poems based in her Australian childhood, and a number about the fraught history of colonisation in Aotearoa, as well as evocations of its land. There are also poems that bear witness to her experience as health professional (one poem mentions ‘the unbearable silence of asystole’), translator (most notably in ‘En Cas d’Urgence’, which switches among English, German, French, Spanish, Greek and Chinese), and manager of a wildlife refuge. That is to say they deal with an astonishing range of subjects.

If I had to generalise, I’d say the book’s central concern is the assertion of the human as part of nature as opposed to abstraction and mechanisation. But as soon as I’d written that sentence I read four short poems that only fit this description with quite a bit of mental contortion.

As with a lot of contemporary poetry, a key feature is a compression of meaning, which means that precise meaning is often elusive.

The poem on page 74 comes with a dedication: ‘for Valeria’. It’s an elegy for a friend who has died:

Nello Specchio d'Acqua
You were a glass blower, un soffiatore di vetro 
hands of silica and carmine
You lifted a globe, il tuo capolavoro
Within it two dancers cast crumbs to pigeons
A window opened to the sea

You were the blind man crossing a piazza
I was your white-tipped cane
On the bridge, at the centre, above the grey 
you were the singer, the song

I was the street sweeper, gathering dust
You were a magician, un pagliaccio intossicato 
dancing across the square

I was the guide in a maddened crowd
You were a tramp passing by - 
a mirage in a watery mirror
adrift on swelling tides

You were wasted, skeletal -
maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola
You were sinking foundations, eroded façade
a stone lion slipped beneath tidelines

The sea swallowed our steps - 
you were swallowed in steps
invaded through doors, the walls of your neck 
your mouth's floor – la tua lingua

They gave you a tube for a windpipe

I measure the loss of you in tides
You were scattered at the rate of tsunami

There was a glass blower, un sofiatore di vetro 
who lifted a globe, il suo capolavoro 
I was a street sweeper, treading water

You came dancing across the square

(for Valeria)

This is a lovely evocation of a lost friend, with references to their experiences together that are cryptic, but not so cryptic as to be frustrating. The friend was clearly Italian, a glass blower, who died of cancer of the throat. The scattering of Italian phrases is a way of honouring the friend’s cultural heritage. (A number of poems in the collection do this with Mãori words, wth a similar effect of honouring difference.)

A specchio d’acqua is usually translated as a calm expanse of water. As specchio means ‘mirror’, the emphasis is on the surface reflection rather than other watery qualities – so the phrase could also be translated as ‘watery mirror’ (as in stanza four). Most of the other Italian phrases are pretty much explained in the text: capolavoro is ‘masterpiece’; un pagliaccio intossicato is ‘a drunken clown’.

The first stanza introduces the friend as an artist, and focuses on a glass globe created by her, a glass globe containing two dancing figures.

The next three stanzas riff on that image, describing the poet’s relationship to the artist in terms of two figures in a setting that suggests Venice: the big square, a group of tourists, a bridge, water. The poet was mundane, ‘gathering dust’; the friend magical, a drunken clown, a mirage, a singer, an exotic beggar. It’s not all one-way – the ‘I’ is a white-tipped cane for the friend as blind man, perhaps implying that she brought some groundedness.

Then the poem turns abruptly to the friend’s final days, wasted and skeletal. Interestingly the key information is left untranslated: maligno il cancro, il tuo fiore in gola, ‘malignant the cancer, your flower in the throat’. It’s as if the poet can’t bear to say the words in her own language. In what follows, the images of Venice are no longer of romantic waterways, bridges and tourist-filled squares, but ‘sinking foundations, eroded façade’ and the threat of rising sea levels. The cancer invades the friend’s body like floodwaters, in steps at first – and then, in the third-last stanza, leaving all thought of Venice behind, with the overwhelming force of a tsunami.

The single-line stanza, ‘They gave you a tube for a windpipe,’ interrupts the metaphorical elaboration with a moment of brutal literalness. There’s no need to name death itself: this tube says it all.

The last two stanzas turn again. The first of them reprises the poem’s opening movement, condensing it into three lines, but now the friend is no longer addressed directly. She can only be spoke of in the third person – ‘There was a glass blower’. The poet now recalls herself, not as gathering bust but as treading water ,an alrernative way of saying the same thing, that paves the way beautifully for the final line.

And the final twist: the friend can be spoken to again – and the vital image of her as she first appeared reasserts itself: ‘You came dancing across the square.’

I so get this! A friend of mine died recently. There was a wonderful farewell gathering where her many achievements were celebrated, and her qualities as a friend eloquently evoked. I can’t think of her without a terrible sense of loss, but at the same time my mind keeps returning to an occasion when, a fifty-something woman exultant at having won a game of canasta, she leapt onto the card table to do a wild, stomping victory dance.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Sea Skins.

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Winter reads 7: Two bilingual poetry books

Posted on 10 Aug 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my seventh post on books I took with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76 (or page 47 when there is no 76): two very different bilingual books from Flying Island.

Yannis Rentzos, Divertente and other poems, translated by Anna Couani (Flying Island Books 2023)

Yannis Rentzos was born in Crete and has been living in Australia since 2006. His poems bear witness to his European roots as well as his antipodean present. The poetry is elliptical. I kept feeling that if I had been able to read the original Greek I would understand them better – not necessarily the evasive meaning, but perhaps something in the sound that is inevitably lost in translation.

For example, I particularly liked the poem ‘I know you are coming’, which seems to be about the death of a man, perhaps the poet’s father, whom he has ambivalent feelings about. Here are a couple of lines that suggest with wonderful economy that the man has spent time in prison, hint at violence, but remain opaque – in this way they are typical of much of the poetry:

In your first years on the outside
a plate, a glass

A suit hung unworn.
The cops knew, they turned a blind eye

Were the plate and glass smashed, as suggested by mentions of violence in surrounding stanzas? Why was the suit unworn? Did the cops turn a blind eye to the broken stuff, or to the unworn suit? If the latter, does that mean the suit was stolen? So many unanswered questions. But the plate, the glass, the suit are there in the poem and in the man’s past, radiating meaning – it’s just that we readers don’t know what that meaning is.

The final third or so of the book is devoted to a single sequence titled ‘Walk in Waverley’. Instead of Greek text on each right-hand page, there is a photo. In effect it’s a poetic-photo-essay on Sydney’s wonderful Waverley Cemetery.

Page 47 is on the second spread of the sequence, the first that includes text:

This gives you some idea of the way text and image relate to each other throughout. They don’t illustrate each other explicitly, but as the text – mostly a single line per page after this – evokes thoughts of death and transience, the images suggest a walk among the graves, disturbing the crows that live there. On this page, the text –

(On the unkissed side of the glass - 
the trodden wild chamomile 
a candle
a favour to his mother)

– is a preamble to the walk that takes up the next ten spreads. It suggests a different style of grave from the one pictured – one with a glass-enclosed shrine. The man referred to in the fourth line maybe the person taking the walk through among the graves, starting at his mother’s grave. Perhaps these lines are a kind of dedication: ‘favour’ here meaning not so much as kindness as a token of affection or remembrance. You’ll notice that I say ‘perhaps’: nothing in this books is absolutely explicit.

Vaughan Rapatahana, te pāhikahikatanga/ incommensurabilty (Flying Island Books 2023)

According to his author’s biog, Vaughan Rapatahana is one of the few World authors who consistently write in and are published in te reo Māori (the Māori language).

As well as a rich collection of poems rooted in Māori experience, this book includes a powerful essay on how important it is for Māori and other colonised peoples to learn and use their mother tongues.

The English language is one that historically and contemporaneously is all-too-often a deleterious influence on the languages of other cultures, in that its agents superimpose English with its inherent ‘cultural baggage’, on them. … The solution? To write in one’s indigenous language as much as practicable and to hope, to expect, that readers and listeners aspire to learn it too.

(Page 124–125)

Elsewhere:

I now write in my first language, the Māori language. Why? Because I want to fully express everything in my mind, in my heart, in my soul.
I cannot express myself fully in another language. For example, the English language is crammed full of the subject matter and cultural customs of the lands of Britain. The words of that tongue are inappropriate.

(Page 9)

The book is not just a bilingual book of poetry; it’s also a book about bilingualism. The incommensurability of its title refers to the impossibility of a ‘perfect’ translation. Anyone for whom the issues of translation matter will be interested. Likewise anyone interested in the long work of undoing the damage done by colonisation – to colonisers as well as colonised.

As a native speaker of the colonising language (with Irish and Scots Gaelic lost several generations ago), I’m reluctant to quote a whole poem, but here are a couple of lines from the English of ‘it is time for a big change’ on page 76:

there are many youths suiciding,
________________________-__ too many Māori youths
there are many women as victims of domestic violence
___________________________ too many Māori women
there is the ongoing issue of racism also,
__________________________ remember Christchurch.

And the original te reo Māori:

ko nui ngā rangatahi e mate whakamomori;
___________ he nui rawa atu ngā rangatahi Mãori
ko nui ngā wāhine ki ngā patunga o te whakarekereke ā-whare;
___________ he nui rawa atu ngā wāhine Māori
ko te take moroki o aukati iwi hoki;
___________  e mahara Õtautahi.

You don’t have to know much Māori language to immediately see some things lost in translation: in Māori, the lines mostly rhyme; in Māori, the second and fourth lines can end with the word ‘Māori’, whereas in English, the word is in a less emphatic position; and where the English translation has ‘Christchurch’, the Māori original has ‘Õtautahi’. The first and second of these differences are about the music of the poem. The third is a small illustration of the principles I quoted earlier: the English name inevitably carries connotations of England, of the Englsh Christian tradition; the Māori name makes it that much easier to remember that the victims of that mass shooting were Muslim.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copies of Divertente and other poems and te pāhikahikatanga/ incommensurabilty.

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Winter reads 5: Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist, page 76

Posted on 4 Aug 2023 | 4 comments

This is my fifth post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76. Most of the books have been physically tiny books of poetry. This is the second novel.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster 2009)

One of the men from my Book Group handed a copy of The Anthologist to me with a knowing look. ‘You’ll love this,’ he said.

He was right.

Paul Chowder is a minor US poet. He has had poems in The New Yorker and is on nodding terms with eminent literary figures. When the book opens he’s running spectacularly late with his introduction to an anthology he has edited, of rhyming poetry. His girlfriend, Roz, has found his procrastination unbearable and moved out. Over the next couple of weeks and almost 250 pages, he ruminates on what he wants to say in the introduction, does a half-hearted clean-up of his house and workspace, makes feeble attempts to win Roz back, and reflects on his own failings as a poet and a human being.

That’s it. It’s not exactly nail-biting stuff. I loved it.

The guts of the book is Chowder’s mind playing over the things he wants to say in the introduction. He has theories about metre that fly in the face of standard accounts, but are far from ridiculous. He spells them out in detail, with many examples. He considers the last century or so of ‘free verse’ to have been a mistake, though he admits some excellent poems have been written without rhyme. He detests enjambment. He dishes the goss about great poets of the past, and has plenty to say about key poets – especially Swinburne (too much of a good thing), Marinetti (bad), Elizabeth Bishop (good), Ezra Pound (very bad). He takes several pages to rip into Pound – the man himself and those who protect his legacy. His opening salvo gives you the general gist:

Pound … was by nature a blustering bigot – a humourless jokester – a talentless pasticheur – a confidence man.

(Page 92)

This may make it sound like a series of lit-crit essays strung together on a flimsy narrative. But that’s not so at all. It really feels that we are spending time inside the hand of a man almost totally preoccupied with matters poetical. If we learn something, that’s a side benefit. If we disagree with him, all the better. You may have to be interested in poetry to be interested in Paul Chowder: there’s no exuberant sex as in Alejandro’s Zambra’s The Chilean Poet, another excellent novel about poetry. The stakes are pretty low – will he get back with Roz, will he ever write his introduction, will he ever write a poem he thinks is any good? But I for one enjoyed it from cover to cover.

Spending a little time on page 76, I realise that we learn a lot more about Paul than I have indicated so far. The page begins with memories of his father, who used to recite two poems ‘with his fists clenched’ – ‘John Masefield’s “Cargoes” and E. E. Cummings’s poem about the watersmooth silver stallion. I had to look the latter poem up (it’s here if you’re interested): Paul Chowder’s father was more sophisticated than my parents, who sang ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and recited part of ‘The Hound of Heaven’ respectively; my older brother used to recite E. E. Cummings’s poem with ‘mudluscious’ in it.

He says in passing that he misses his parents every day – a note that is struck a number of times without further elaboration. Then his mind moves on, first to Tennyson:

Tennyson’s father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems.

Characteristically, having made a huge value judgement, he pulls back from it:

Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I’m not sure.

None of this may make it into the Introduction, but a constant process of drafting and redrafting is under way.

But his mind won’t stay there for long:

Last night I watched two episodes of Dirty Jobs and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realised that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved

Now, the second most visited post on my blog is about a book by Mary Oliver, so whether by calculation or otherwise, Paul’s wanting her book next to him will strike a chord with many readers (it does with me). She was alive when the book was written, and I hope she would have been chuffed that he turned to her for salvation, even though she doesn’t use rhyme or strict metre.

If you picked up The Anthologist in a bookshop and flipped to page 76, you’d get a fair idea of what the book is: a kind of stream of consciousness of a man who is steeped in poetry and feels himself to be part of a great community of poets living and dead – a poet himself, a passionate reader, a teacher of sorts, a mind that’s alive.

I hear that Nicholson Baker has written a second book about Paul Chowder. I can’t imagine it.

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Winter reads 4: Jill McKeowen’s Sunday morning, here

Posted on 2 Aug 2023 | Leave a comment

This is my fourth post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

Jill McKeowen, Sunday Morning, Here (Flying Island Books 2023)

Sunday Morning, Here is another book in Flying Island’s hand-sized poetry series. Jill McKeowen’s bio tells us that, among many other things, she has been a regular reader at Newcastle Poetry in the Pub, and that this slim volume is her first book of poetry. I hope there will be many more.

It’s the kind of book that opens a window into the poet’s life: daily observations of life around her home on NSW’s mid-north coast, and on her travels up the coast and across the continent; some splendid poems about cockatoos; a whole section dealing with her father’s death and its aftermath; a section on her childhood family, then and now. Some poems suggest a disciplined practice of writing for an hour each morning. The poems are warm and genial, sometimes playing with form (there’s a nifty and heartfelt homage to Elisabeth Bishop’s The Art of Losing).

The title poem, ‘Sunday Morning, Here’, is partly a response to a Wallace Stevens poem, ‘Sunday Morning’, signalling that McKeowen expects to be read in conversation with other poets. Its first line, ‘Here there’s no complacency, but ease’, echoes the first word of the Stevens poem (‘Complacencies’), at the same time highlighting a recurring theme: the poet’s life is in the main comfortable and pleasant, but it includes an awareness of privilege: ease, but not complacency.

Serendipitously, the poem on page 76, ‘It’s still dark’, embodies many of these general characteristics.

It's Still Dark
I nudge the doona back, unwrap 
my sleep to the cold, and drift 
consoled in fleecy gown, pocket 
feet into slippers, feel
my way on hushed carpet, spark 
the gas heater to flame, flick 
the bathroom into light, give 
thanks for this convenience;

I fill the kettle from the tap, 
strike a match to more gas, 
slice ginger into boiled water, 
put my night-dried dishes away, 
sip the tea by fire glow, 
watch the rising-falling breath 
of curled cat, and write 
a reckless page of adjectives.

A woman wakes by the road 
close to a border town, her body 
warmth still wrapped around 
her sleeping child,
unseen
by armed militia.
She must look for water
while the dawn is pinned with stars.

Serendipitously, as I’m typing this I have on the table beside me a glass of ginger tea made from slices of ginger. I don’t wear slippers, my holiday rental has tiled floors, there is no cat, but the sense of simple luxury conveyed in the first two stanzas communicates beautifully. The four beat lines move smoothy, and the relaxed suggestions of rhyme (pocket/drift, spark/flick) and alliteration (water/away) hold the lines together, contributing to the sense of ease.

But not complacency.

The flow is disrupted in the second-last line of the second stanza, after the ultimate image of laziness – the ‘curled cat’ – comes a midline break in the sense, the first in the poem, and the line ends on just three beats, so that ‘write’ takes on a different, less indolent feel. Things are still easy but there’s a sense of purpose. Then ‘reckless’ confirms the change in mood. What is this reckless undertaking? It’s a writing exercise, perhaps a warm-up for something more challenging. Elsewhere in the book there’s a suggestion that McKeowen has a regular practice of writing in this way.

The third stanza takes the poem somewhere else altogether. It’s as if the act of putting words on paper ‘recklessly’ her mind is dragged from its early-morning drowsiness to awareness that her ease and comfort are an extraordinary privilege. The image of the woman who does not share her privilege bursts into the poem in lines of uneven length, with line breaks that do violence to natural phrasing (body / warmth, unseen / by armed militia). The other woman too has to find water, but in radically different, more precarious circumstances. We don’t need specifics of what country she is from: there are plenty to choose from.

I’m sure someone has said that good literature doesn’t provide solutions to problems, but helps to understand them. That’s certainly true of this poem. It gives us an unsettled and unsettling juxtaposition of two early-morning awakenings. A lesser poet might have gone on to spell out how the juxtaposition affected her – inspiring feelings of helpless guilt, say, or a decision to increase her regular donation to UNICEF. But that would have let the reader off the hook.

What we are left with is the final image of the dawn ‘pinned with stars’. As in those classical Chinese poems where the moon can be seen by the exiled poet and also by those who are far away, both women in this poem can see the stars. It’s a reminder of their shared humanity, and of ours.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Sunday Morning, Here.

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Winter reads 6: Kevin Smith’s Another Day

Posted on 1 Aug 2023 | 1 comment

This is my sixth post on books I took with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

Kevin Smith, Another Day (Flying Islands Books 2023)

It was exquisitely bad timing that I read Another Day concurrently with Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist. Baker’s protagonist Paul Chowder detests enjambment, even in such hallowed places as the opening lines of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and Kevin Smith’s poems fairly bristle with enjambments.

But the poetry got me over that hump fairly easily.

It’s a collection of 38 poems, many of which have been long- or short-listed for literary prizes in Australia and elsewhere. There are enjoyable travel poems and people-watching moments; sex, birth, fatherhood and grandfatherhood. If I had to pick one poem that put unexpected words to experience similar to my own it would be ‘At Once Father and Son’, in which the poet speaks to his son who has just become a father himself. These lines also, incidentally, illustrate the poet’s attachment to enjambment:

And when I watch you look
___into his face – your own face –
full of wonder that you

and he were meant to be –
___so it was I used to think
that this would never end.

But time – travelling on 
___a one-way ticket –
won't return. And so we've drifted.

You've grown into a man 
___as I had done – as surely
as your son will do. And my hands,

empty of you all these years,
___tell my time has passed,
my station done.

One striking thing about the collection as a whole is the powerful poems about the cancer treatment and eventual death of a loved one. These are scattered through the book, with the disconcerting effect that these terrible things are somehow just part of life – just another day, perhaps – until they come to a grim conclusion in the final pages

Page 76 is parts 3 and 4 of the book’s only prose poem, ‘More Soft Than Water’. It’s a narrative – a short short story. In the first two parts the narrator recalls how as a young man he accompanied his sisters on their volunteer nights at an unidentified institution. A baby girl is placed in his arms, with skin ‘more soft than water’.

3.
Each week, I came back to her and walked the 
corridors again. Through a window, she caught
the light at play among the eucalyptus leaves 
brought to life by a breeze; her eyes fixed on 
them as I cradled her in my arms. Then some-
one told me she was dying. Her mother had to 
let her go, they said, or her husband would have 
left her too. So she became a ward of state. Some 
weeks later, I stood outside the facility door and, 
despite the cold, I could not make myself go in.
On the way home my sisters fixed their eyes on 
the road.

So much in so few words! According to the ‘About the author’ at the back of the book, Kevin Smith ‘has worked primarily in drama and theatre, as actor and writer’. I think a reader might have deduced that from these lines. The narrative beats are so clear: his slow bonding with the baby in the first two sentences. The seven-word bombshell. A quick backflash in the next two sentences, then the main action of the poem: the young narrator’s failure. And his sisters’ implied condemnation of his cowardice.

All the narrator’s emotion is conveyed by action and objects. We see the baby’s face as she watches the leaves. The bald statement of her expected death is left without commentary. There’s no judgement on mother’s past decision. We’re left to make our own interpretation of the narrator’s inability to enter the facility and of his sisters’ fixed gaze. This is letting the actions tell the story; it also creates a sense that the emotion of the moment is still too painful, possibly too shameful, to name. 

4
For a long time I wondered if you'd died, and 
when. Sometimes I imagine I'm still standing at 
the door – the wind like a knife in my back – as 
I remember how comfortably you fitted into my 
arms. Once, you looked at me, and galaxies of 
stars kindled in the darker regions of my heart.

In the end, the poem isn’t concerned with a possible moral reading of the incident, but with an opportunity missed. There are probably hundreds of poems about what happens when you look into the eyes of a small baby. I think of Francis Webb’s sublime ‘Five Days Old’, though the echo here of these lines doesn’t mean Kevin Smith was necessarily thinking of them:

The tiny, not the immense
Will teach our groping eyes
So the absorbed skies
Bleed stars of innocence

The poem is full of regret, but also gratitude. If that young man had moved away from the wind’s knife, perhaps the baby’s look would have kindled more than stars.

You can find out more about Kevin Smith at his website, https://www.kevinsmithpoetry.com/.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Another Day.

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Winter reads 3: Tony Birch’s The White Girl

Posted on 31 Jul 2023 | 6 comments

This is my third post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

Tony Birch, The White Girl (UQP 2020)

Tony Birch has turned up in my blog fairly frequently as a contributor to Overland, winner of awards and speaker at writers’ festivals (link here). The White Girl the first novel of his that I’ve read, and it has been burning a hole on my bookshelf for years.

A friend told me she gave up on it after about 20 pages because it was full of stereotypes and it signalled crudely what was going to happen – she’d rather read non-fictional accounts of the terrible things done to First Nations families by white justice and so-called welfare, rather than something filtered through a more or less didactic imagination.

She was wrong. Many expectations are set up in the first part of the book, many disasters foreshadowed. But the expectations are more often than not overturned.

It’s the early 1950s. Odette Brown lives in the now near-deserted part of an Australian country town that once was home to a sizeable Aboriginal community. Now there’s just her, her fair-skinned, blonde-haired, twelve-year-old granddaughter Sissy, and at some distance her oldest friend Millie. Both Odette and Sissy have run-ins with a loutish young man who carries a gun and drives a dangerous truck. The local police offer no protection, and – worse – there’s a new officer in charge who takes his role as ‘Guardian’ of all Aboriginal children seriously. He is biding his time to take Sissy into ‘care’. Add to that, Odette has increasingly frequent spasms of pain in her side and a doctor has told her she absolutely must have surgery – surgery which she can’t afford, even if she was willing to leave Sissy unprotected while she was in hospital.

So the set-up ticks a lot of boxes: apart from the above, there’s a retired Afghan cameleer, a Polish teenager on the run from immigration officials, a Holocaust survivor with a tattooed number on his arm, a brain-damaged white man who runs a junkyard, a posh white woman who buys art from Odette and sells it with a bogus tribal attribution.

But, probably at about the place where my friend gave up, the story takes off. The focus is on Odette’s courage and ingenuity. Allies turn up in unexpected places. Sissy’s white appearance becomes an asset as well as a vulnerability. Other Aboriginal people tell their stories to Odette. Partly one feels that these stories serve a didactic purpose, making sure we know that terrible things were happening to First Nations people in the real world. But they also remind us how high the stakes are, right up to a climactic scene where the evil policeman (yes, he is pretty two-dimensional) makes his final play.

Page 76 is one of two moments when a First Nations character enters a rundown settler dwelling. In the other moment, Odette finds the decrepit old man, father of the young man with the gun and the truck. In this one, Sissy is testing the limits of her freedom on a day when Odette won’t be home until late. She wanders into an abandoned white farmhouse, knowing she could be in trouble, and the scene takes on an Mrs-Haversham eeriness:

Sissy opened the door of an ornately carved wardrobe. It was full of women’s dresses, scarves and coats. She reached out and touched the sleeve of a red velvet dress pitted with moth holes. The material fell apart in her hands. In the mirror in the centre of the wardrobe, Sissy could see the fireplace and mantle behind her. A large gilded portrait sat above the mantle. She walked across the room and stood in front of the frame. It was a photograph of a white family, standing in front of the house. The men in the photograph wore suits, the women dresses and straw hats. Children sat in front of the adults. The girls had beautiful long hair and wore white dresses. Sissy put a finger to the glass and imagined herself wearing such a fine dress. On the edge of the group, at a slight distance from the family, stood two Aboriginal women. The older woman had her arms crossed over her breasts and looked sternly into the camera. The younger woman refused the lens completely, looking off to one side.

What can I say? My friend gave up too soon.

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Winter reads 2: D G Lloyd’s alive in Dubbo

Posted on 30 Jul 2023 | 5 comments

This is my second post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

D G Lloyd was born in Dubbo in the late 70s. After spending some time in coastal cities as a young adult, he lives in Dubbo once again. This book is a celebration, of sorts, of his hometown.

It opens with an epigraph from one of Dubbo’s most notorious daughters, Kate Leigh, who is described politely by the Australian Dictionary of Biography as ‘a crime entrepreneur’. The epigraph reads, ominously, ‘Better dead than alive in Dubbo.’

Roughly speaking there are three kinds of poems in the book: incidents from childhood or more recent times, impressionistic images of places, and character sketches. There’s poverty and various kinds of desperation, churches and a brothel, heroin and alcohol, First Nations and settlers (I read D G Lloyd as non-Indigenous), locusts and PTSD. A portrait of the town emerges that’s unlikely to attract tourists, but it rings true – as if the poet has set out regularly with a verbal equivalent of a sketch book and come back with its pages full.

Page 76 chimes beautifully with the epigraph, being the book’s only poem dedicated to the dead: 

Old Dubbo Cemetery
Uncared for, a grassy verge and 
artificial roses decorating headstones 
fallen in;
corroded shards and etchings, tilted obelisks,
a cobweb and an orb-weaver in between

the dirt and the gravel, 
oleanders,
a baby's grave marked by a small iron cross; 
the stone angel. Eyeless.
Sullen lips speckled with mould, petals 
drifting from outstretched fingers onto brown earth.

A council worker stands behind hakea wattle 
scraping his boot against the water meter. Cicadas 
chant (endless);
one of the monuments is missing an arm.
A blue-tongued lizard lies motionless beneath, 
bathing in sunlight
against a tawny, heart-shaped tombstone.

The conjures up an image of the cemetery, without editorialising or sentiment. Like most of the book, it feels artless: no rhyme to speak of, no metrical effects, no striking metaphors. Yet it holds the attention – I’ve now read it a dozen times and I’m not tired of it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed. There’s no full verb in the first two stanzas, but a past participle on almost every line: Uncared for, fallen in, corroded, tilted, marked, speckled, outstretched. All movement is in the past. What life there is, in grass, orb-weaver, oleanders and mould, doesn’t disrupt the lifelessness. The first of the two present participles in these stanzas – decorating – is as static as the headstones it refers to. At last in the eleventh line, there’s some movement with a second present participle – drifting.

As if the spell has been broken, the third stanza is full of life and action: a council worker scrapes his boots, a wattle grows, cicadas chant, a blue-tongued lizard sunbathes. The water meter, by implication, ticks. That the cicadas’ chant is endless suggests that in some way life goes on and will keep going on. One of the statues now has a full verb – ‘is missing’ – so even there there’s a hint of agency.

The final image of the lizard, the sunlight and the tombstone is already full of life, when the description of the tombstone as tawny, heart-shaped takes it to another level. The unexpected ‘tawny’ describes the the tombstone as a rich brown, weathered colour rather than the dull grey that dominates most cemeteries, but the vital associations from its usual use – of wild animals and birds, or port wine – hover around it.

Finally, the stone is heart-shaped. It would be pushing it to see a reference to the famous last line of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb‘, ‘What will survive of us is love,’ but that is presumably the hope that led to the tombstone being shaped that way. Here the love has not survived, but its emblem, the’ tawny heart-shaped tombstone’, is part of the life that continues.

I’m grateful to Flying Islands Books for my copy of Alive in Dubbo.

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