Tug Dumbly, Tadpoems: 400 Shorts (Flying Island Books 2024)
Most poetry books are at least a little intimidating to most people. Tadpoems is not one of them.
In an introductory note, Tug Dumbly (offstage name Geoff Forrester) calls the poems ‘little squibs’ and explains that many of them were born on walks, his mind ‘conversing with whatever it passes at the moment … or maybe just playing with words’. Most of them first appeared on Facebook. ‘A few,’ the note continues, ‘are shameless life-support systems for dad jokes’. It’s rare for a book of poetry to include such a clear and unassuming account of itself.
In addition to the 400 tiny poems, there are more than 40 photos, many of water scenes around Sydney, and close-ups of insects, birds and plants. The book is not only accessible fun, it’s also gorgeous.
It’s a book to be dipped into, enjoyed a moment at a time.
Many of the poems nudge the dad joke genre towards something satirical of even at times profound. One of my favourites:
After too much talk in the cultural hub it's good to wing home over a bay of beautiful banality.
I like this too:
Recycle. Be re-astounded by the same dear things.
Page 78* is a striking photo of a dead seagull among fallen jacaranda blossoms – a very Sydney image, and not at all typical of the abundant life in most of the book’s images. There are four ‘tadpoems’ opposite:
The poems include a throwaway, bitter criticism of the commodification of everything, ending with a mildly erudite reference to Arthur Sullivan’s song ‘The Lost Chord’:
Plus they found the Lost Chord. (You can't play it. It's owned by Sony.)
There’s a not-quite-successful joke about changeable weather, and a pun on lit crit terminology. I wouldn’t mind seeing the movie Narrative Ark
And a bit of wordplay that is exactly the kind of thing you can imagine happening in a wordy person’s mind as they go walking:
Went shopping when chopping wench hopping in the shopping centre. Unexpected item in the brain area.
It’s silly and makes no claims for itself, but something sticks. The last two lines could refer back to the first three. A paraphrase would be, ‘That discovery of homophones that just popped into my head is unexpected.’ A humourless discussion of the poem might use terms like metapoetic or recursive. One nerdy person might see a reference to shopping malls as pickup locales (I just googled “shopping mall pickup” and sure enough it’s a porn trope). Another might see the poem as enacting an important non-linear mode of mental activity. I think they’d be right, but I’d be too busy moving on to the next ‘squib’ to join the conversation.
It’s a friendly, unpretentious book. Reading it is a bit like going for a walk with someone who points out interesting things in the environment, and who shares his thought bubbles. He’s good company.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Brian Purcell is a painter as well as a poet. He was lyricist and singer with the rock band Distant Locust, which gets a consistent rating of four stars (out of five) on rateyourmusic.com. He’s been involved in community literature for decades – in 2010 he founded the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival, which celebrated ’15 years of storytelling magic’ in June this year.
Filmworks is a collection of 41 poems, all but one of them named with film titles. The exception, ‘Reason’, has the subtitle ‘Man Ray’s films of the 1920s’, so it’s barely an exception at all.
Here’s a random selection of opening lines to give you an idea of the range of movies that make the cut and the range of poetic responses to them.
An autobiographic note in the first poem in the book, ‘2001’:
A small boy beneath a big screen that begins to split, somersault, explode at the beginning of an infinite journey.
Notice the lower case ‘depression’ in ‘Top Hat’, so that it can signify both the context of the movie’s creation and a mental state that it may help with:
A parallel universe where depression does not exist
High level showbiz gossip in ‘The Misfits’:
Her husband wrote the part for her as a farewell gift.
Details of the movie are evoked vividly in ‘Blue Velvet’, though this is not how I remember the film beginning, probably another example of my unreliable memory:
The crushed blue velvet gently moving at the beginning of the film hangs down like an enchanted sea or a field where fabulous creatures roam.
In ‘The Imitation Game’ – dedicated, of course, to Alan Turing – the film is a springboard for a poem on our attention economy:
Secrets we all have them and they kill us.
I love this book. It feels like an extended conversation with another film lover, a conversation that can go anywhere, and does. And not a Marvel Universe blockbuster in sight. It makes me want to do a similar collection of poems about my own favourite movies.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation . I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
Apart from being a poet, David Adès is a podcaster. On Poets’ Corner, described on YouTube as ‘WestWords’ monthly encounter with celebrated Australian poets’, he has presented more than 50 poets, from Ali Cobby Eckermann to Mark Tredinnick. I could have linked to his conversation with Nathanael O’Reilly when I recently blogged about O’Reilly’s Separation Blues.
The Heart’s Lush Gardens, part of the Pocket Poets Series edited by Christopher (Kit) Kelen, is his fourth book. An introductory note dedicates it to the men in his men’s group, which has been meeting since 1992. ‘These Are the Men’, the title poem of the second of the book’s three sections, echoes that dedication:
Into their hearts' lush gardens they took me, gardens of unexpected flowerings amid bracken and tangles of vines, gardens where the soil had been laid bare and seeds planted, where I am welcome to roam and return.
That so resonates with the joy I remember feeling in my first consciousness-raising group (that’s what we called them in 1976).
This is not the only appearance of the men’s group, and masculine identity and the experience of being a man are broached in many other poems. ‘Slingshot’ imagines David facing Goliath without that weapon; ‘Small Man’ grapples with male entitlement (‘I am a small man in the house of my white skin, the skin of privilege’). The first poem in the book, ‘From Which I Must Always Wake’, is a complex, raw seven pages on heterosexual desire and relationship.
There’s a lot more. I’ll just mention ‘Ripples’, which a note tells us was inspired by a water-damaged original copy of someone’s thesis and poetry manuscript that Adès spotted abandoned on the footpath. The poem’s speaker addresses the writer of the lost work:
This is what you do not know: who picks up the petal
you have dropped into the Grand Canyon, who looks upon it in wonder
as if upon the first petal
My arbitrary practice of looking at page 78* has borne fruit once again. The fine poem ‘Bacha Posh’, which starts on that page, has an interesting take on gender.
According to its Wikipedia entry, bacha posh is a practice in Afghanistan in which, often motivated by poverty, some families will pick a daughter to grow up as a boy. I probably didn’t need to look that up to understand the poem – but it’s good to know that it refers to an actual practice.
I don’t know David Adès, but I’m assuming he’s a cis man, and so likely to be regarded with suspicion if he enters the current public conversation about gender, and in particular trans issues. The practice of bacha posh gives him a way of letting his mind play over aspects of gender, and gender non-conformity, and invite readers to join him. Here, the non-conformity is imposed on the child rather than arising from an inner motivation such as gender incongruence.
This is a terrific example of a poem doing something that would be hard to do in a prose essay. It’s not arguing a case or offering an opinion. You could say it makes music from the language of gender. A handful of words and phrases repeat, almost like chiming bells. I don’t know how well this will work on the screen, but here is a nerdy look at how the gendered words and verbs of being and becoming occur in the poem.
I am daughter of parents who needed a son, who needed someone to go out into the world, to work and support, to be a man.
I was a girl who dressed as a boy, who learned the freedom of a boy, to be outside, unconfined, to be able to play under the sky.
I became a woman, blood between my legs, breasts I tried to hide, but I could not become a woman, confined indoors to a woman's life.
I became a woman with the strength of a man and the heart of a woman, with a man's thoughts and dreams, with a woman's courage.
I am a woman who is more than a woman and less than a woman, a woman who dresses as a man but is less than a man.
I am a woman who does not avert her gaze, who lives in the world outside, without children or husband, without the life of a a woman.
I am my father's son, a woman called Uncle, a woman who goes where women cannot go, who does what women cannot do.
Out of necessity, I became more and I became less, I became half and half, outcast yet respected, choosing one life so as not to live another.
I didn’t notice until I did that exercise that the final stanza no longer has any gendered words, an eloquent absence. In addition, it repeats the phrase ‘I became’, the phrase of transition, three times. And, in contrast to the first stanza where the poem’s speaker has no agency (‘I am daughter / of parents who needed a son’), here he/she is engaged in a dynamic continuous act of choosing.
Having done that little erasure experiment, I now see that there are other bells in this chime. Active verbs are scattered throughout, appearing more densely towards the end (‘goes’, ‘go’, does’, ‘do’, ‘live’); and the prepositions ‘with’ and ‘without’ have a sort of call and response between stanzas 4 and 6.
Apologies for the nerdiness of this, but if you’ve got this far I hope you’ve enjoyed looking with me. I hope it, and the poem, make a small contribution to Trans Awareness Week, 13–19 November.
I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Separation Blues is a selection of poems from Nathanael O’Reilly’s nine previous books, published over 30 years. Each of those books had its own coherence of theme and manner, but this book mostly hangs together beautifully. There’s a bit of whiplash when eight Covid lockdown poems from boulevard (Downingfield Press 2024) are followed by four from Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (also Downingfield Press 2024), which mimic the semi-literate style of the famous Jerilderie letter. But I’m not complaining.
I’m currently reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Something she writes (on page 53) seems relevant to these poems:
Maybe it’s best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I’m all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I’m weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.
Most of the poems in this collection avoid theories and explanations, or overt expressions of emotion. Most of them describe. Many are structured as lists – of things, people and thoughts encountered while travelling; youthful escapades; political events witnessed. There are a couple of dramatic narratives – a poem’s speaker faints at a service station, and in a different poem he catches fire at a backyard barbecue – but they too have a laconic descriptive air. Even the love poems and elegies, of which there are quite a few, mostly leave their emotional heft to be implied, hovering in the silence around the poem.
Page 78* is the second page of the poem ‘Greek Summer’.
This is one of five poems in the book with the dedication To Tricia. Some of the others are travel poems featuring ‘we’. ‘Côte dAzur (1905)’, for example, begins ‘During our last childless summer / we lay on the beach at Eze’. In ‘Greek Summer’ the poet travels alone. The first two stanzas on page 77 begin, respectively, ‘On the road from Patras to Corinth’ and ‘In Delphi’, and in the third he is again in Delphi. In those stanzas, he eats, drinks ouzo, performs bodily functions, chats with the locals, notices things – including the strong Australian accents of some taxi drivers, and American college kids who ‘grind on each other’. He ends the third stanza pondering his ageing soul. It’s an impressionistic travel diary.
On Page 78 our solitary poet visits two more islands, and arrives at Athens on the mainland.
First there’s Aegina:
On Aegina I rent a Vespa, gorge myself on olives, tempt fate in board shorts. At Sarpas, Athena unleashes her hair, bares brown breasts, knocks back another Mythos, submerges in the Saronic.
More eating and drinking and mild intercultural discomfort – are board shorts acceptable? At Sarpas Beach, there’s a little poetic playfulness: this is the land of the Ancient Olympians, so when a woman goes topless on the beach, he imagines her as an avatar of Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, and suggests (punning on Mythos, the name of a local beer) that by letting down her hair and baring her breasts she’s knocking back the myth that she, Athena, is aloof, dignified and virginal. He’s enacting the male gaze all right, but not full-on lasciviously. He doesn’t imagine the woman as Aphrodite goddess of love, and the detail of her breasts being brown suggests that his interest is at least partly sociological: this is her usual behaviour at the beach. His gaze is detached, touristic, the erotic element quietly backgrounded.
On to the next stanza and the next island:
On Hydra I drink ouzo with the ghosts of Johnston, Clift and Cohen, walk in Winton's footsteps, follow donkeys through alleys, fantasize about checking out, staying on to write novels.
More drinking. Here, he is a literary tourist, wearing his Australianness on his sleeve. Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston famously did a lot of writing, drinking and fighting on Hydra in the 1960s, some of it in the company of young Leonard Cohen. Tim Winton’s novel The Riders has a sequence on Hydra, in which, if I remember correctly, he rides a donkey on a winding hillside path searching for his wife who has done a runner (and whom he never finds).
As a matter of nerdy interest, this poem appeared in O’Reilly’s 2017 book, Preparations for Departure (UAP Press), before the current resurgence of interest in Charmian Clift and the time Leonard Cohen spent on Hydra. See Nick Broomfield’s Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019), the 2024 Norwegian TV series So Long, Marianne, Nadia Wheatley’s selection of Charmian Clift’s newspaper columns, Sneaky Little Revolutions, or Suzanne Chick’s memoir, Searching for Charmian.
The poet’s fantasy of checking out ‘to write novels’ has the same detached feel as his gaze at ‘Athena’ earlier.
The tourist narrative continues:
Drinking before dawn on a Plaka rooftop with new friends ten years younger
Without breaking a sweat, threads come together. He’s in the Plaka, a neighbourhood near the Parthenon, the ruined temple of Athena, who is now an abstraction, no longer topless with her hair down. Earlier he has watched young people and felt his age, he now drinks through the night with them, but his mention of the age difference here reinforces rather than contradicts his sense of having an ‘ageing soul’.
I miss your presence, wish you could share the view, the wine, my bed.
And boom! The poem reveals itself to be a love poem. It’s not a travel diary after all, but a letter home. The details that make up his narrative have been selected with the letter’s addressee in mind. I see young people grinding (and I think of you). I see Athena letting her hair down at the beach (and I think of you). I think of George and Charmian’s relationship (and I think of you), of The Riders (and I think of you).
Many of the poems in this book have similarly unflashy appearances. I don’t know if they all repay close, careful reading as much as this one. I do know that some made me cry. One or two made me gasp. More than one left me pondering a surprising word.
I was searching for a way to finish this blog post, when I came across Anne Casey’s speech launching the book, in the Rochford Street Review (at this link), which includes this:
Here, you will learn of his great loves – gained, lost, and those most closely held. There are elegant elegies – to cherished friends, family, places and times; hymns to eroding ecology and loss of innocence; casually dropped epiphanies; and searing sociopolitical commentary. Small moments provide windows into worlds, slipping through the decades of Nat’s life and his many travels. In this book, he also visits with ghosts of Australia’s troubled settler history.
All true, especially the bit about small moments providing windows into worlds.
I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I saw two sleek crows enjoying the brilliant sunlight this morning. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Beijing born Yao Feng is a much awarded poet, translator, artist and prose writer. In 2014 when this small book was published he was Associate Professor in the Portuguese Department at the University of Macau, where Kit Kelen, one of the translators of this book and series editor of Flying Island Books, was also a professor.
One of the lovely things about Flying Island Books is that they have two publishers, one in the cosmopolitan city of Macao (which seems to be the accepted spelling in English) and the other in Markwell, a tiny village 16 kilometres from Bulahdelah in New South Wales. The Macao partner is ASM (the Association of Stories in Macao), which has been described as ‘the most devoted publisher of translated literature in Macao’. As far as I can tell ASM was originally Kit Kelen’s baby, and is now under the directorship of Karen Kun, another of this book’s translators.
The book’s title poem is a series of eight dramatic monologues by characters who have stood on the Great Wall over centuries, from lonely soldiers to graffiiti-ing tourists. There are other poems that deal with Chinese history, including ‘memories yet to be disarmed’, a reflection on a painting in memory of the Cultural Revolution. But not all the poems are about China – and not all of them are on serious subjects. The poet sits in the sun and watches jacaranda blooms at the summer solstice, he looks in the mirror and sees that his ears have mysteriously disappeared, he imagines in what circumstances he might renounce his atheism and ‘approach God on all fours’. Poems are set in various parts of China, but also in Portugal, the Netherlands, the USA, Japan … the list goes on. There are poems about Pushkin, Ceaușescu, Aung San Suu Kyi and Marilyn Monroe. In other words, these 130 pages contain multitudes, and are a terrific introduction to this poet.
The poem on page 78, which I’m focusing on because of my arbitrary blogging rule*, has personal resonance for me.
hot pot place
menu, filled with names of animal organs bubbling water, smoke blurred our faces we sipped our beer salvaging chunks of cooked corpse the law of the jungle has it — to kill or be killed to sustain a life, others must die to feed a life, others must be sacrificed a pile of bodies and we thrive with laughter what appetite! not even the least sorrow for life
Let me start with my grandson.
My four-year-old grandson is uncompromisingly vegetarian. He likes lambs or pigs to pat in a petting zoo, not to eat. When he overheard a WhatsApp message from someone saying they’d bring a chook to the Book Group, he asked if the chook would be alive, and I felt like a criminal when I told him it would be cooked and ready to eat. There was horror in his voice when he told me one afternoon that the lunch at daycare had been spaghetti bolognese.(He went hungry that day.)
‘Hot Pot Place’ lobs neatly right there. In case you need reminding, in such restaurants a variety of uncooked food is placed on the table, and the diners drop their chosen morsels into a communal pot of boiling stock. The first four lines conjure a cheerfully exuberant social occasion in one: the smells, the sounds the tastes are effectively implied.
The tone changes in the fifth line. The diners aren’t just fishing pieces of meat from the pot, but ‘salvaging chunks of cooked corpse’. The harshness of the language is completely in tune with my grandson’s horror at bolognese sauce, and the next four lines, with their change from past to present tense, can be read as a defensive response from a meat-eater. Everywhere in nature animals eat the corpses of other animals. So it makes sense to enjoy this meal.
But this is a poem, not an argument. The lines about the law of the jungle can also be read as affirming: in eating meat we are playing our part in the natural order of things.
I remember the particular joy I had as a child – quite a bit older than four, I think – when a bullock I’d known from when he was a calf was cooked on a spit at a party to celebrate a family member’s major birthday. Terry, the bullock, even had a nickname. We children called him Pookie because his head was often adorned by a little cap of cow poo from approaching his adopted mother’s udder from behind. I don’t remember feeling any horror, more a kind of comfort that I was eating an animal I knew, not one that had been turned into a commodity.
Then the last four lines. Are they the words of someone recoiling from the carnivorous spectacle? Or are they celebrating the event? Or even somehow both?
It’s not possible to read the phrase ‘a pile of bodies’ without thinking of horrendous events of the last hundred years, including some events where the bodies have been those of animals – I’m thinking of beached whales and recent massive fish kills in New South Wales. So the line ‘a pile of bodies and we thrive’ holds an almost impossible tension. It doesn’t condemn, but it won’t look away.
The last line, I think, does make a judgement. The poem’s speaker isn’t arguing for vegetarianism. It’s ‘sorrow for life’ that is absent, not guilt. He is noticing a callousness in himself and his companions. My mind goes back to Terry/Pookie: along with the joy of eating him, there was something that you might call reverence. The poem doesn’t ask, but it opens out towards asking: is it possible to thrive with laughter and appetite and at the same time honour the lives of the beings we eat, to feel the sadness of the dispensation in which ‘to feed a life, others must be sacrificed’?
My grandson would probably read the poem differently from me. It’s a bit beyond his capacity right now, but if he ever does get to read it, I hope he finds as much joy in it as I have.
This is my sixth post for National Poetry Month, and the fourth bilingual book from the Flying Island Books.
I first read Great Wall Capriccio while flying between Djaubay land and Gadigal Wangal land. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Patricia Sykes, Among the Gone of It, with Chinese translation by Xu Daozhi and Wu Xi (Flying Island Books 2017)
This is my fifth post for National Poetry Month, and my third bilingual book this month from the Flying Island Poets series.
A web search for “Patricia Sykes poet” produces a large number of hits that begin, ‘Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist.’ She has collaborated with composer Liza Lim to create The Navigator, a chamber opera, and a number of her poems have been set to music. As a child she was a resident in the Abbotsford Convent orphanage in Melbourne (now an arts precinct), and as an adult she was a member of the Women’s Circus, both of which have been subjects of her poetry – in The Abbotsford Mysteries (2011) and Wire Dancing (1999) respectively, both published by Spinifex Press.
Of the translators, Xu Daozhi has a PhD in English literature studies from the University of Hong Kong and Wu Xi is a poet and scholar who was also stationed in Hong Kong at the time of translation. Again, I can’t comment on their work except to admire its visual beauty.
The poems in Among the Gone of It that spoke to me most strongly were those dealing with illness and ageing. By happy coincidence, one of these poems falls partly on page 47*.
‘Cassandra Vegas’ is a sequence of six poems in which the title character undergoes major surgery for cancer. Her name signals the poems’ concerns. In Greek myth, Cassandra had the gift of seeing the future, and Vegas is a synonym for gambling: so much language around illness and surgery is about prognosis (prophecy) and percentages (gambling odds). The sequence begins with ‘Casino’, in which Cassandra contemplates the risks of surgery or not-surgery:
to operate will swell the death odds not to operate makes death certain
This is followed by ‘Theatre’ and ‘Anaesthesia’, whose titles give you their place in the narrative, though not their poetry. In ‘Angel Switch’ she is in intensive care after the operation. In ‘Vegas, Vagus’ she leaves hospital,
the craved bliss of silken air a leaf's kiss on her bald head like welcome to a newborn
and learns how to deal with the changes in her body.
The final poem is ‘Ante’, of which all but the first three stanzas are on pages 46–47.
The title, meaning ‘before’, at first seems ironic, as the poem is in the position where you might expect one titled ‘Aftermath’. But it also sits in anticipation of whatever is to come next – an ante is a bet placed on the table before the next hand is dealt.
The first three stanzas have dealt methodically with the immediate past (‘praise from one of the surgeons’), the present (‘each mouthful is a reinvention’) and the unknowable future (‘her chromosomes do not speak / how then can she prophesy?’). The poem now opens out:
she is old in the tooth, the head the centuries blink, crises grow worse she has plenty of voice but less reach
she thinks of Apollo's rank kiss thinks of the woman the god the half real the half myth
Not that the preceding poems in the sequence have been straightforward narrative, but this marks a shift. ‘She is old in the tooth, the head’ is a simple literal statement, but with ‘the centuries blink’ it takes on a grander meaning. As in Walter Pater’s famous description of the Mona Lisa, ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits’, the woman in this poem has become archetypal. The crises that grow worse refer both to her individual worsening health crises and to the deepening crises of the society and world around her. In another context, ‘plenty of voice but less reach’ could be a lament about contemporary poetry in general – there’s a lot of it out there, but the readership is small. (I’ve just been listening to a lecture by Sarah Holland-Batt on the Fully Lit podcast, in which she says, ‘Australia has never been short of poets, it’s short only of poetry readers.’)
In the next stanza the archetype is further identified. Cassandra in Greek myth was given the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, but when she didn’t reciprocate his desire (his ‘rank kiss’), he added the curse that no one would believe her prophecies.
The remaining stanzas enlarge on that last line: what does ‘the half real the half myth’ mean?
The next stanza is a kind of bridge. It first evokes her post-surgery difficulty eating, as described earlier, and then goes to a new place:
the food in her bowl contracts, congeals, each doubt a portion, a fragrance, a dance
The unpleasant image of food contracting and congealing becomes a metaphor for doubt – the uncertainty, tentativeness, anxiety that can follow major surgery. Somehow these doubts, this unpleasant food, are transformed, in three steps. The food is a portion – it is what has been allotted to her, what has landed on her plate. Unpleasant as it looks, it has a fragrance – let’s attend to qualities other than its visual qualities. But there’s a subtle shift. Food has a fragrance, but here each doubt is a fragrance. The poem is leaving the literal food behind and talking now about what it represents metaphorically. In the final word of the stanza, the food has gone completely, the doubts are transformed into a dance.
The next three stanzas spell out the nature of that dance:
she visits ocean, gathers beads of it aqua, turquoise, milky blue strings them, prays them, swims them
knows nothing, everything, watches doors, the hours, changes, stays the same, wonders
Crude paraphrase: ‘She is fully alive to the world.’ I love the idea of gathering beads of ocean – to wear, to pray like a rosary, to immerse herself in them. And I love the line break at the end of this stanza. If the poem finished here, we’d be left with Cassandra filled with wonder. That meaning lingers for a moment, but at the start of the next line the meaning of ‘wonders’ morphs from ‘has a sense of awe’ to ‘asks the following questions’.
stays the same, wonders
if what she guards is herself or a presence called life
The play with myth is resolved. Like all of us, this woman is an embodiment of something sacred, ‘a presence called life’. ‘Guards’ is an interesting word. Unlike words like ‘battle’ or ‘struggle’ commonly used in this context, it implied strength but also tenderness and caring: she is not defensive, but protective, of the ‘presence’.
And the poem ends with an acknowledgement that survival is inevitably temporary. A harsh paraphrase of the final stanza might be, ‘Wonders how she will die.’ But it’s interesting to notice what that paraphrase leaves out (and I so wish I could read the Chinese translation). In this phrasing she won’t die – she will be killed. The ‘thing’ could be a car, a cancer, a virus, a lightning strike. And what it will kill is this precious, tender thing. It’s not fear of death being expressed, but a cherishing of life, knowing that death will come. The pedant in me would insist that ‘softly’ is an adverb, that it should be ‘bright, soft breath’. I can’t justify it, but the pedant is just wrong this time.
And I’m so glad there’s no full stop at the end. Even punctuation can carry metaphorical meaning.
wonders how it will come the thing that will kill the bright softly breath
I first read Among the Gone of It while flying between Djagubay land and air and Gadigal Wangal land and air. I wrote the blog post on the Country of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, 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 Among the Gone of It finishes on page 77, so my personal algorithm sends me to page 47 (I was born in 1947).
Judy Johnson, Exhibit, translated into Chinese by Iris Fan Xing (Flying Island Books & ASM 2013)
This is my fourth post for National Poetry Month.
Like Geoff Page’s Codicil, Exhibit is a bilingual book, aiming to bring an Australian poet to a Chinese readership.
According to the book’s dust-flap, Judy Johnson has been writing and publishing poetry for 20 years, and has won a number of prizes. She was editor of Picaro Press’s Wagtails series of chapbooks for some years. In 2021 she appeared with David Ades on his Poet’s Corner video show (link here), where among other things she spoke interestingly about her African-American convict ancestors and her book Dark Convicts, which I now have on order from Gleebooks.
Iris Fan Xing, the translator, was a PhD student at the University of Western Australia when the book was published in 2013. An interview with Robert Wood in Liminal Review of Books in 2021 (at this link) makes lovely reading for anyone who’s interested in translators, wonder-workers who are usually pretty much invisible. Sadly, my only response to her work in this book is to enjoy its visual beauty.
The book’s verso pages – that is to say, the English text – are terrific. To attempt the impossible and generalise: the poems tend to focus on small things (‘Three Tools’ fulfils the promise of its title), specific places (‘Walking Nobby’s Breakwall’ is almost a poetic manifesto for focusing on the small and partial), small interactions (‘Words, after an Absence’), without ever being trivial. Again and again in this book I was struck by a brilliant metaphor.
A poem that could provide a fun exercise for students, one of several set in Ireland, is ‘Saint Kevin and the Blackbird’ (which you can read as first published in Westerly in 2012 at this link – it’s a PDF, and you need to scroll quite a lot). The late great Seamus Heaney wrote a poem of the same name (which you can read at this link). Both poems tell the legend of a bird building a nest in the saint’s hand outstretched in prayer. One imagines what is happening in the saint’s mind and body; the other makes acerbic feminist comment on his broader life. Judy Johnson isn’t afraid to take on the big names.
If you were browsing in a bookshop and flipped to page 78* of Exhibit, you’d be looking at the first of two pages of the poem ‘Thirty-Four Years On’. Here it is, with the Chinese translation opposite:
The title is a bit of a tease: thirty-four years on from what? My guess, based on the numbers given in the poem, is that its present moment is the year 2001, and the immediate prompt of the poem is a fireworks display, probably as part of Australia’s centennial celebrations. The fireworks remind the poem’s speaker of a similar display from her childhood, which she calculates to have been 34 years earlier. (It’s not that 34 is a significant anniversary, as in the episode of the Seth Hogan show Platonic when a character celebrates her ‘big two-six’.)
Thirty Four Years On I watch fireworks two streets away spring the night of its entrapment
I’m used to thinking of fireworks as embodying ephemerality: now they’re here, and beautiful, now they’re gone leaving nothing but the smell of cordite. In this poem they have a different effect. The night is normally trapped in just one time, but the fireworks explosion frees the speaker’s mind to be in more than one time at once, like magic:
the way a magician springs a waterfall of coloured flowers from a black top-hat.
This is the kind of thing I mean about Judy Johnson’s use of metaphor. The firework’s time-freeing effect is magic, and the fireworks share other elements with a magician’s act – the cascading colours produced from a hat, which further bolsters the metaphor by being black like the night.
The next three stanzas play with time and space in more or less abstract ways. How this relates to the opening image won’t become clear until the following stanza.
Don't tell me nothing is as it was.
A possible paraphrase of this is, ‘I don’t want you to remind me of the obvious fact that that things are always changing.’ The poem’s speaker is experiencing the present moment as identical to some other moment.
Distance closes and expands.
She is also experiencing physical space as relative. In her mind, she is living in two times and places at once.
A million year eye-blink calls the light of stars to my reaching fingertips.
Isn’t that beautifully put? We know how long it takes light to reach us from the stars, but that’s not how we experience it. It’s both a million years and an eye-blink. At the same time, the stars remind us that the poem started with a fireworks display two streets away – and also 34 years ago.
The next stanza brings us back to the present moment:
In the dark I am adult and six years old yearning for a space beyond the scaffold of my bones.
At a literal level, then, the fireworks remind the speaker of a similar display when she was six years old. The ‘scaffold of my bones’ echoes the ‘entrapment’ of the night. She remembers as a child longing for transcendence.
Because I’m looking at the poem closely, I’ve done my sums. Judy Johnson was born in 1961. She was six in 1967, and 34 years after that, she is 40 and Australia is celebrating its Centenary. The poem is prompted by a fireworks display in 2001.
Having been taken back to that moment, she then moves forward in time:
In a year's time when I am seven an artery balloon will burst inside my father's heart.
If the poem ended here, it would be a bit of a downer: ‘Ah, these magical fireworks remind me of a similar display when I was six. Oh, then my father died.’ But that’s not the tone. The next stanza, over the page, also a three-liner, moves forward to the next year, 1969, with an abrupt change of register from intensely personal to public. 1969 is the year when ‘Neil Armstrong will take / his giant leap for mankind’.
This progression changes the way her father’s sudden death is presented: not so much a personal trauma as simply the next major event after the fireworks, with the moon landing the one after that. It’s not that the pain of her father’s death is minimised – it’s just not indulged, and it’s not mentioned again in the four remaining stanzas of the poem. In my reading, that silence is the heart of the poem.
I want to quote one more stanza:
The second hand of the clock holds each moment in suspension just before, like a slingshot it lets go.
The observable way a second hand moves jerkily becomes a metaphor for the way we remember moments, almost like still photographs, but that time moves on inexorably.
The final paragraphs return to the fireworks, seen through a window, whose ‘four corners / are cardboard clips in an old album / holding in their freeze frame / that same photograph’. Time moves on, things change constantly, but this moment make those past moments present: the fireworks, the clouds of smoke (‘black an silver rags’), and
the same small footprint of a man appearing on the ghostgum moon.
I’ve heard Evelyn Araluen speak derisively about how settler Australians love to write about ghost gums. At the risk of incurring her mockery, I think ‘ghostgum moon’ is perfect here – as an Australian reference that contains the word ‘ghost’ it does a lot of subliminal work. The poem focuses closely on that ‘same small footprint of a man’, leaving the bursting artery balloon in the realm of the unspoken, almost unspeakable, but with just the wisp of a reference to it in those final two words of the poem.
(For reasons that are probably peculiar to me, I find myself remembering Biblical quotes and theological concepts from my youth: ‘The seven years seemed to him to be just seven days, so great was his love’; the sacrifice of the Mass doesn’t just commemorate Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, it is that sacrifice, happening in the present moment, not repeated but the same.)
Not that I saw all that on first reading, but I felt some of it, which is what poetry can make happen.
I first read Exhibit while flying over countries between Djabugay land and Gadigal Wangal land. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
Geoff Page, Codicil, tanslated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2019)
It’s National Poetry Month in Australia. The Red Room Poetry site lists a plethora of events, workshops and competitions, promoted by ambassadors ranging from journalist Stan Grant to comedian Suren Jayemanne.
Codicil is the third book of poetry I’ve read so far in Poetry Month. I plan to read and blog about three more.
Geoff Page’s poetry has been around for a long time. I have an alarming number of anthologies of Australian poetry on my bookshelves, and his work appears in most of them, from Poet’s Choice (Island Press 1971, a limited, hand-set and -printed edition of 500 copies) to Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann 2016). His work is wonderfully accessible, using traditional forms without being trite or hidebound. For an intelligent discussion of his poetry, you’d find it hard to go past Martin Duwell’s review of his New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013). The whole review is worth reading, but I’ll just quote his description of Page as ‘a public poet who reflects the social concerns of the time of the Bicentennial and into the first decade of the twenty-first century’, and as a writer of personal poems with the ‘dominant image of himself as an outsider in a family he loves’.
Duwell’s description fits Codicil, which includes some new poems and at least three of his most anthologised poems, ‘Smalltown Memorials‘ (1975), ‘Grit’ (1979) and ‘My Mother’s God‘ (1988) – the links are to recordings of Page reading the poems on the Poetry Archive website. What I take to be the most recent poems here deal with ageing and the approach of death – the title poem is instructions for the disposal of the poet’s ashes on the Clarence River, where he spent his childhood.
I imagine that the poems were selected by the translators, themselves accomplished poets in Hong Kong, with the intention of introducing Page’s work to Chinese readers. I wish I could read Chinese, because I’d love to know how they have dealt with the frequent Australian idioms and throwaway references. Like this from ‘Three Akubras’:
Three Akubras in a row my brothers underneath them standing at the saleyards there
Or this, from ‘Severance’, an imagined speech to an employee being sacked:
User Pays and Market Forces are all the rhet- oric you'll get.
(And what have they done with that weird hyphen that’s there for the sake of metre and rhyme?)
And I’d love to know what a Chinese reader might make of his occasional professions of allegiance to iambics, as in ‘I Think I Could Turn Awhile’, in which he imagines writing ‘like the Americans’, an heir to Whitman. But then:
I'd hear the clipped iambics calling, my template just beneath the line
For me, alas, the bilingual aspect of the book amounts to a purely visual effect – and it is fascinating to see what these very Australian poems look like in Chinese characters.
Here’s an image of pages 77 & 78*:
The poem, first published in Island magazine in September 2009, is neither a public poem dealing with issues of the day, nor a personal poem dealing directly with family or mortality. I read it as a letter to friends who are on a boat somewhere on the Baltic Sea, perhaps in response to a photo they have sent. Whatever, it’s a wonderful evocation of a still, moonless night on the water.
It’s almost a sonnet. The first eight lines paint the scene, and the almost perfectly regular iambic pentameters (de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum) enact the calm of the night.
Late August in the Baltic for Julie & Håkan
Late August in the Baltic and the night has got some darkness now. Tonight, no moon, no lid of cloud.
You're on the lee side of an island, one of those low Swedish mounds. You're in a bay not spelt in lights;
you wake at two and go on deck. The water is a black shellac;
Then there’s a turn, so gentle, in mid stanza with just a semicolon to mark it. The lines get shorter, and the literal elements of the poem – the island, the time of year, the deck, the absence of lights on shore – give way to more fanciful language:
the curvatures of heaven
continue underneath as now, at last, you see it.
Then the regular iambics re-establish themselves – as if a small wave of metaphor has momentarily disrupted the stillness of the poem, and it can now continue, but with a broader view:
The universe is all about you,
high above and far beneath. Such stillness will not be repeated. You’re at the centre of the stars.
Pause for a moment to look at the second last line. Without it, the poem would have been a sonnet, and the bunching up of sibilants in ‘Such stillness’ strikes a dissonant note. I don’t think this is a flaw. What the line says – a warning not to expect life always to be like this – is unobtrusively reinforced by its comparative harshness and a faint sense that it disrupts the form. Whatever, it makes sure that what is to come in the last line is read as humbling rather than grandiose.
The last line gies us the word that has been implied but conspicuously missing from the first part of the poem: ‘stars’. It’s not completely irrelevant that this is the word that comes at the end of each book of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
We are at the centre of myriad points of light – not a narcissistic centre, but one who for this unrepeatable moment has a glimpse of the immensity and splendour of the cosmos. I’m reminded of Yayoi Kazuma’s infinity mirror rooms.
I’m in awe of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng for taking on the task of translating a poem that works so much through the rhythms and traditions of its native language.
I read Codicil on Wulgurukaba land, beautiful Yunbenun. I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those Nations, and welcome any First Nations readers.
* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
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.
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).
Me fail? I fly! 