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Magdalena Ball’s Bobish

Posted on 30 April 2023 | 1 comment

Magdalena Ball, Bobish (Puncher & Wattmann 2023)

If you are poetry-shy or poetry-curious, Bobish maybe just the book you’re looking for. ‘Bobish’ is a version of the Yiddish word for grandmother – Bobish is a life story in verse of Magdalena Ball’s great-grandmother. It’s made up of short, self-contained poems that form a straightforward narrative thread.

The heroine, whose name became Rebecca Lieberman, left Russia in 1907, leaving her parents, her family and the world she knew. with many other Ashkenazi Jews from from the Pale of Settlement she ended up in New York City, where she worked for a time in the garment industry – including being home sick from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on the day in 1911 when 140 workers – mostly young women – were killed in a fire. The book follows her life through a violent marriage, the two world wars, motherhood, old age, and the legacy she has left her descendants.

Everyone should have a great-granddaughter who will honour their life in this way: seeking the facts and filling the gaps with humility, empathy and grace.

I can’t think of a better way to tell you about this book than to show you a single poem. Here’s ‘Potatoes’ from pages 75–76. It’s in ‘Fish Smoker’, the third of the book’s six sections, in which Rebecca meets a fish smoker who ‘smelled of home / whispering the mother-tongue in her ear’, and marries him. ‘Potatoes’ conveys the corrosive effects of poverty and terrible working conditions. It doesn’t aim for high drama, and there’s none of the playfulness that shines in other poems, but perhaps it will give you an idea of how the verse form can evoke a scene, suggest emotion, invite the reader’s heart into the story.

Potatoes
Some days it was only barley broth. Some days 
a few bits of squashed herring
brought home from the bottom
of the barrel, his legs purple
from standing in ice water all day.

She arrived at the apartment before him, her hands 
shaking as she cut up what food she could find, 
cabbage mostly, purchased cheap from
the vegetable peddler, fit only for stewing.

If there was bread, it was so hard 
she needed a hammer to break it.

Dizzy, hair spilling from her combs 
she would tuck it behind the ears 
ignoring the migraine that began in the morning 
at the sewing machine, all day at the machine 
with no breaks, fingers throbbing.

It was not the life she'd dreamt of, curled 
under a thin blanket during the Russian winter.
The streets here were not paved with gold, after all.

Tomorrow there might be windows that opened 
hot running water, a proper flushing toilet, 
potatoes. These were her new dreams.

She tried, without success, to sweep away 
the grime that encrusted the floor 
to wash the smells of rotting cabbage 
and smoked fish from her clothing.

The scent followed her to work, where her 
sewing machine kept going until the bell rang 
and she never drank water because the door 
to the toilet was broken and the toilet was so dirty 
she feared becoming ill by using it.

She bent over, her young back hunched as she
leaned into the machine trying to forget the pain 
that followed her like a faithful dog 
the rest of her life, and she got used to it.

She never told him about the way her body 
continuously hurt, carried her pain silently 
into the shared space 
no one wanted to call home.

The last poem in the book, ‘What Remains’, begins with a question and answer:

How far back can you go?
You can never go back.

This answer is obviously true if we’re talking about time, and in reference to the migrant experience, as in this poem, it’s heartbreakingly true. I was going to say that in this book Magdalena Ball has done a mammoth job of going back in imagination to Rebecca’s life. Then I realised that ‘What Remains’ has a different way of seeing what has happened in the book. It hasn’t so much gone back in time as captured what remains. Here are its final lines, the final lines of the book:

Magic is a gift not held 
solely in fading photographs.

It lingers, like your voice 
humming a Yiddish song 
winding through the double 
helix of your children, filling the air 
everywhere.

I’m grateful to the author for my copy of Bobish.

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Sarah Holland-Batt’s Jaguar

Posted on 21 March 2023 | 2 comments

Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar (UQP 2022)

If you come across The Jaguar in a bookshop and want to dip, I recommend any of the first half dozen poems. Possibly the most direct is ‘The Gift’ on page 4, which you can also read online at The New Yorker in February 2021, or the Australian Book Review in June 2021.

The book is shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win. It begins and ends with stunning poems bearing witness to the final illness and death of the poet’s father. They are almost unbearably good in their own right, but carry even more force when one is aware of Holland-Batt’s passionate and eloquent campaigning for improvement in the aged care sector (as in this article in the Guardian).

Here’s part of the Kenneth Slessor Prize judges’ citation:

The Jaguar is a tremendous collection of poems, deeply compelling in their subject matter and exemplary in their attention to language and craft. … This is muscular, tenacious writing of great intensity that bears unflinching witness to the decline and death of a loved one, that embraces the necessary suffering that is part of loving and of being human. The Jaguar is poetry of the highest order — poetry that changes us in the reading of it, that reminds us of the inevitable.

From State Library of NSW website.

My current blogging practice is to focus on page 76 of the book I’m discussing. In The Jaguar, that page comes part way through the third of the book’s four sections. Not all the poems in this section relate to the poet’s father. There are a couple of break-up poems, some despatches from the high life on the Riviera and the USA. ‘Tiepolo’s Cleopatra’ might well be a response to John Forbes’s ‘On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra’ (which you can read at this link) – both attend to a painting that reeks of decadent luxury. The poem on page 76, ‘The Worst of It’, appears between two poems about past romantic relationships – ‘Night Flight’ (‘our bodies puzzled together in that room’) and ‘Mansions’ (‘When I think of you I think of mansions’):

The Worst of It
As I combed it, 
he sat cross-legged 
in front of me, 
bent over 
like a penitent, 
his head heavy 
as intimacy.
An easy gesture, 
like wind riffling 
blue dunegrass 
in tidal weather.
Salt and pepper 
at the temples, 
or more accurately 
silver, perilous 
and stellar.
A wave in it, 
long from lack 
of cutting.
How can I go back 
to knowing nothing, 
knowing this?

There are three pronouns: I, he and it. We know who I is; we know what it is; he is unidentified. I read him to be the poet’s father, but he could be a lover or even someone in a patient–nurse relationship with her. It’s part of the poem’s power that his identity isn’t explicit. Readers are free to invent their own specifics.

The short lines aren’t typical of Holland-Batt’s poetry, but they work beautifully, inviting the reader to focus on each element, each connotation, as they are revealed line by line. There’s a lot of unobtrusive echoing of sound – not exactly rhyme – that binds the lines: ‘combed ‘cross-legged’; ‘front’, ‘bent, ‘penitent’; ‘heavy’, intimacy’; ‘silver’, ‘perilous’, ‘stellar’; and so on all the way to the repeated words in the final couplet.

The line-by-line movement is especially clear in the first seven lines, where a physical scene unfurls: first the action of combing, then the man’s basic position, then his spacial relationship to the speaker, then his bowed attitude, then a traditional meaning of that attitude, then a close focus on the head, then the poem’s key word, ‘intimacy’. I love the way the music of these lines builds to that word as a resonant conclusion. Heaviness isn’t an obvious quality of intimacy: we’re not dealing with, say, the intimacy of fresh love, but something more sombre.

In a kind of undulating movement away from that heaviness, the next four lines quietly surprise by comparing the combing action / gesture to wind blowing though blue dunegrass (of which you can see some images here in case, like me, you’re botanically ignorant). Though it doesn’t say so explicitly, this suggests that the two people in the poem have spent time together at sandy beaches, so the intimacy hasn’t always been heavy.

The next eight lines focus on the hair and, again one line at a time, what it tells us about the man.

  • ‘Salt and pepper’: he’s ageing
  • ‘at the temples’: but not what you’d call old or elderly
  • ‘or more accurately’: wait on, the poet is about to rethink her use of a stock phrase
  • ‘silver, perilous’: the light and the dark; on the one hand precious, and on the other in danger, perhaps because ageing brings one closer to death, or perhaps something more specific
  • ‘and stellar’: a nice alternative to ‘salt and pepper’ to describe ageing hair – flecks of shining white against a dark background
  • ‘A wave in it’ – ‘stellar’ felt like the end of the description, but the poem decides to linger a little on the hair itself, noticing other qualities
  • ‘long from lack’ – here’s a place where the line break does a lot of work: by leaving the word ‘lack’ suspended for a moment, it reinforces the earlier suggestions that the man is somehow in trouble: penitent, imperilled
  • ‘of cutting’ – on the one hand this clarifies that the lack is as mundane as not having gone to a barber, but it also suggests a degree of neglect.

In the final three lines, something of the emotional meaning of the moment is revealed. Or more accurately is invoked. This moment of combing the man’s hair comes after a discovery that has transformed the relationship. Given the wider context of the book, I read it as the moment when the father has told the daughter of his illness and the grim prognosis, but in itself it’s not tied to that. The tenderness of the first fifteen lines has been laced with a hint of sorrow or threat. These last lines bring those elements to the surface: something has happened which cannot be reversed.

So, this isn’t one of the book’s poems that takes its readers by storm. But quietly, artfully distracting from its artfulness, it delivers a moment, the kind of moment that could happen at the midpoint of a movie: the moment when we know where things are headed. A moment when we hold our breath and understand the shape of things.

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Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother

Posted on 13 March 2023 | Leave a comment

Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother (Cape Poetry 2022)

This book is dedicated ‘for Peter’ (who I’m guessing is the poet’s partner) and ‘for my mother, Lê Kim Hồng, called forward’. The inside front flap confirms what the dedication implies:

In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother’s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. … Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family and the value of joy in a perennially fractured American spirit.

In a 2020 interview with Seth Meyers (on YouTube here) promoting his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong spoke beautifully of his relationship with his mother. She must have died soon after the interview.

This is not a single-focus collection. It opens with ‘The Bull’, a dream-like encounter between a bull and the narrator as a boy (you can hear Vuong read it at this link). Like a dream, the poem invites a range of interpretations: could it be about vague adolescent guilt (‘I was a boy – which meant I was a murderer / of my childhood’), or religion (‘my god / was stillness. My god, he was still there’), or ambivalence about sex (‘I didn’t / want him. I didn’t want him to / be beautiful’), or a psychotic episode? It’s a suitably uncanny introduction to the book as a whole, which is – if nothing else – hard to pin down.

The next couple of poems likewise don’t insist on a single theme: if anything, mental illness seems to be taking centre stage. The first long poem, ‘Dear Peter’, is a verse letter apparently written in a psych hospital (it begins ‘they treat me well / here’).

But given the context of the poet’s mother’s death, these poems can be read as ’embodying’ the profoundly unsettling effects of grief. The last lines of ‘The Bull’, foe example, reveal that behind the image of the bull lies a sense of oneself as a grieving animal: 

enough to hold. I
reached for him. I reached - not the bull - 
but the depths. Not an answer but 
an entrance the shape of 
an animal. Like me.

As in Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (my blog post here), there’s a complex interplay between the author’s identity as a young gay man who migrated to the USA from Vietnam as a child, and his relationship to his mother and her experiences both before and after migration. For example, ‘Not Even’ (page 35) starts out with a witty take on the changing social status of gay men:

Hey

I used to be a fag now I'm a checkbox.

The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.

Further on, a young woman at a party says to the poet: ‘You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to write about war and stuff. I’m just white.’ The next lines are:

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold.

Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

But the poem doesn’t stay at that satirical level. It goes to deeply felt issues of ‘war and stuff’, including the kindness of a stranger and, inevitably, his mother’s death, until it arrives at a stunning metaphor for emergence from grief – which I won’t quote here because you really do need to read the whole four pages to get its full effect. A slightly different version has been published by the Poetry Foundation website at this link.

Even a poem such as ‘Old Glory’, a non-rhyming sonnet that lists common US turns of phrase, doesn’t depart far from the theme of death and loss. It begins, ‘Knock ′em dead, big guy’, and ends, ‘I’m dead.’

As usual, I want to look at some of the poetry in close-up. I’ve picked page 75 arbitrarily (it’s my age – at least it was when I started this blog post), but it happens to fall part way through ‘Dear Rose’, the most powerful and interesting poem in the collection. You can read the whole poem at this link, with an elegant introduction by Ben Lerner.

For context, it’s a long poem, 33 eight-line stanzas, framed (like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) as an address to the poet’s mother. It recalls key moments from her life: a schoolhouse destroyed by napalm when she was six years old; her ostracism in Vietnam as the son of a white US soldier; her brother shot dead for stealing a chicken to feed her. Intermingled with these historical moments are some apparently random elements: the sight of an ant carrying its dead brother; memories of his mother making fish sauce from the salted corpses of ‘a garbage bag of anchovies’. Page 75 goes from mid-stanza 17 to stanza 21. In the image below, disregard the first word, a carry over from the previous line. It may help to know that ‘their’ in the first line refers to the fermenting anchovies:

First, a word about punctuation. There isn’t any. Even line-break and stanza-breaks don’t function as punctuation. One effect of this is to slow the reader down. Several times, even in this short passage, you have to stop and realise you’ve moved on to a new thought. The transition point isn’t always clear. In what follows you may well have a different notion of where the sense breaks fall. It’s worth noticing how meaning is often carried over the line-breaks and stanza-breaks (technical term: enjambment). The effect varies, but there’s usually a moment of suspense that’s resolved at the start of the next line (‘almost /-sauce’, ‘dissolved / by time’), or a slight surprise as the meaning changes or enlarges (‘like an animal / being drowned’, ‘the largest thing you knew / after god’).

enter within months their meat
will melt into brown mucus rot almost
-sauce the linear fish-spine dissolved 

by time at last pungent scent 
of ghosts

The fermenting anchovies are not a pretty sight, or smell. They entered the poem as a memory in their own right, but by this stage they’ve come to represent the process of memory, or perhaps of grief: there’s a promise that they will dissolve and develop into something useful, even delicious, but first there’s a lot of painful emotion (‘brown mucus rot’) to be endured. Not yet sauce, they are all that remains of those who have died, ghosts.

of ghosts you said you named me
after a body of water ′cause 
it's the largest thing you knew 
after god I stare at the silvered layers

This abrupt shift of subject is one of many in this poem and elsewhere in Vuong’s poetry. The poem’s attention comes up out of the murk to a clear, simple memory, a many-times told tale, that speaks loud and clear how much his mother treasured him. But then:

after god  I stare at the silvered layers 
the shadowed line between two pressed fish 
is a finger in the dark gently remembered

There’s a difference between the familiar stories of the past, and the way some memories come unbidden and partial, ‘gently’, sometimes without context, like a shadowed line in the fermenting jar. In this case, it’s ‘a finger in the dark’ that’s remembered. 

in the dark his finger 

on my lips Ma his shhh 
your friend the man watching me 
while you worked the late
shift in the Timex clock factory why 
am I thinking this now the gasped throats 
mottled pocked fins gently the door its blade 
of amber light widening as it opened 
shhh it sounds like an animal

being drowned as you churned 
the jar your yellow-white arms pink 
fish guts foaming up gently you must 
remember gently the man he's in 
the '90s still his face a black rose 
closing do you know

This feels like a memory of sexual abuse. As I read it, the question, ‘Why amI thinking this now?’, is answered in the following words: ‘the gasped throats /mottled pocked fins’. Something about the image of the anchovies brings this memory up from the depths. The stanza break here is brilliant: the man’s ‘shhh’ sounds like an animal, and then the first words of the next stanza, ‘being drowned’, tie the memory back to the image of the anchovies as well as leaving no doubt about the nastiness of the remembered incident. I’m fascinated by the repetition of ‘gently’: usually with implications of tenderness, here it suggests stealth – both on the man’s part and on the way the memory steals into consciousness.

Colour is important in this poem. Pink, red, blue, amber, brown, white and black recur, each with a range of connotations, as if the disparate elements of the poem are tied together with coloured threads. The ominous blade of light here is the same colour as the New England light beneath which his mother started the fish sauce, as her hair, and as the anchovies themselves. The description of the man’s face as a black rose contrasts to Vuong’s mother, Hồng – meaning ‘rose’ – who is sometimes describes as pink, sometimes white.

The last phrase ‘do you know’ is the classic question of the abused child to the parent who might have been expected to protect them. Such a question demands to be included in this letter to the poet’s dead mother. But it goes no further, as the mother now speaks, beginning with the same phrase:

closing do you know 
what it's like my boy my 
boy you said sweating above the jar

to be the only one hated the only 
one the white enemy of your own 
country your own
face

You could read this as the mother being incapable of hearing the son’s story. And you’re probably right. But it’s like the extraordinarily powerful moment in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous when Little Dog comes out to his mother, and just as he thinks his big dramatic moment is over she says, ‘Now I have something to tell you.’ It might not be ideal parenting for a mother to burden her little son with a story like this, but this is not a poem of reproach. Far from it. The poet is acutely aware of what his mother has endured – and by implication he has been aware of it since he was very young (‘My boy my / boy’), and it’s her life struggles and triumphs that 

face the trees they were roaring 
above us red leaves leaving little cuts 
in the sky gently I touched 
your elbow the fish swirling 
in their gone merry-go-round

The final lines on this page bring us back to the moment when the mother is stirring the anchovies with her attentive son beside her. The ‘red leaves leaving little cuts / in the sky’ suggests that the exchange has left both of them still wounded, but this time ‘gently’ surely does suggest tenderness, and the merry-go-round is ‘gone’ – the issue can be left behind.

Over the page, as you’d expect, there is further complexity. As with fish sauce, the poem’s disparate elements, many of them horrible in themselves, are mixed together and allowed to work on each other to become an unexpectedly beautiful new thing. If you have a chance, do read the whole thing.

I read Time Is a Mother in honour of World Pride, which has recently dominated my part of the world. The book turns out to be a salutary counterweight to the relentlessly manic imagery with which commercial culture signifies its openness to the LGBTQIA+ community: self-questioning, generous and deeply serious.

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Summer reads 6: Jane Gibian’s Beneath the Tree Line

Posted on 16 January 2023 | Leave a comment

Jane Gibian, Beneath the Tree Line: New Poems (Giramondo 2021)

When Jane Gibian read her poem ‘Leftovers from a Pirate Party’ at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event in 2017, she told us that it was made up of subject lines from freecycle emails. I was a frequent freecycler at the time and was delighted that she had found poetry there – the title of the poem being just one of the poem’s evocative lines.

‘Leftovers from a Pirate Party’ turns up in this book without a note on its sources, and it still works, evoking a wonderful variety of life, and detritus. You can read a version with some extraneous scanner-generated characters at this link. It’s in a section of the book devoted mainly to similar found poems – including ‘Seventeen titles on the New Books shelf: June–July 2019’ whose title a) tells the reader what to expect and b) reminds us that Jane Gibian works as a librarian. At first glance you’d think this playful section, mucking around with lists of found language, was in a different world from the rest of the book, which, as an Author’s Note (online at the Giramondo website, here) puts it elegantly, is ‘preoccupied with the natural world and our place in its increasingly precarious situation’. The note continues:

My thoughts and writing practice seem to be most active in places of wildness, preferably wilderness. Many of these poems engage directly with the natural environment through a range of approaches: human engagement – both fascination and despair – and the natural world itself, disinterested and unforgiving of us, one animal in a complex living web.

That’s far cry from, say, this from ‘Leftovers’: 

RE-OFFER: Disposable diapers
for small cat/dog

Yet among the many things I love and respond to in this collection, there are a lot of lists: from signs of the changing seasons in ‘Each turn’, to observations while travelling and learning the language in Vietnam, to vestigial organs in the human body in ‘Vestigial’. One of the most powerful poems in the book, ‘Waiting’ (which you can read on the Cordite Poetry Review website), does the crucial work of helping the reader grasp the reality of the climate emergency largely by means of a list: parked cars, ‘a mizzle of rain’, newscasts, coral, a factoid about Mars, St Andrew’s Cross spiders, an approaching train. Of course, it’s much more than that, and when I came to the final lines (if that’s the right word for a prose poem) I had to go for a little walk:

in the five previous known extinctions of all life / coral was the first to die / your eyes meet again in the rear-vision mirror

The US poet William Carlos Williams had a famous slogan summarising the principles underlying Imagism: ‘No ideas but in things.’ Jane Gibian isn’t an imagist, and her poetry doesn’t avoid explicit statement of ideas. Maybe it’s more like: sometimes (often?), rather than spelling out your ideas you can give readers an image and let them have their own ideas.

‘Arid zone’ on page 74–75 is a terrific example of this kind of thing:

This isn’t a poem that demands close reading to be appreciated, but it’s worth pausing over.

It’s as much a list as ‘Leftovers from a Pirate Party’ – leftovers from a sustained drought, maybe.

My Latin teacher in secondary school might have called it a congeries, a heaping up, of sights seen from a car travelling across drought-stricken country. Strictly speaking, they’re not haiku or senryu, but they owe a lot to those forms (which are similar in number of syllables etc, but the senryu is more likely to include something about human foibles). The words in capitals at the start of each group of lines look as if they are subtitles, but they’re not. They are road signs, seen from the car just as the other images are, and listed with them more or less arbitrarily.

It’s worth noticing the way the poem sits on the page. The plentiful white space reinforces the sense that the poet is covering great distances, most of it in silence. 

arid zone


CREST
desiccated leather sacks 
punctuating the desert highway 
once were cattle, 
whitened bones worn through 
the taut hides

Not just one corpse, and not the corpses of natural desert dwellers. This is country that usually sustains grazing cattle. We are witnessing the aridity of drought.

Notice how the line breaks work: twice in these five lines, you think you’ve come to end of a sentence, but it continues over the line – the leather sacks … once were cattle, and the bones have worn through … the taut hides. This slight syntactical ambiguity slows you down, as if your gaze has to linger on the passing sight a moment longer.

DIP
Careful Driving Techniques Are Advisable 
informs a buckled sign 
on the unsealed road;
we skipped the National Road Transport
Hall of Fame

This is the senryu-ish section. That is, it deals with human foibles rather than, like the haiku, with observations of nature and the seasons. Officialdom is helpless to deal with this natural disaster: it offers inane advice, allows signs and roads to deteriorate, and promotes a self-congratulatory view of the past.

FLOODWAY
whistling kites float above us 
and beside 130 km/hour traffic, 
a motionless eagle stands stern-eyed 
with a roadkill meal

This is the only road sign that relates to what follows it – and it does it with extreme irony.

You notice the counterpoints in these lines: movement in the first two lines vs motionlessness in the next two; floating kites vs speeding traffic; the whistling of the kites vs the implied roar of the traffic; our implied eyes seeing the kites vs the stern eyes of the eagle (watching us?); the traffic vs the roadkill; the eagle vs the unknown species of roadkill. I love the finality of the word ‘meal’. I’d be astonished if Jane Gibian had George Herbert in mind when she wrote this, but to my ear it has the same satisfying note of completion as the last line of his marvellous poem ‘Love (III)‘: ‘So I did sit and eat.’

GRID
an incongruous cow
lolls hotly in the scarce shade 
of a spindly leaved shrub

Why ‘incongruous’? It stands out as the only adjective in the poem that implies a judgement. It certainly slows the reader down because its meaning isn’t clear. I suppose a cow lolling in the shade of a tree is a normal sight in a green pasture, and even more normal if it’s part of a herd. A solitary cow in country that is scattered with corpses of cattle is incongruous because alive even more than because it’s alone.

The adjectives and adverbs – ‘incongruous’, ‘hotly’, ‘scarce’, ‘spindly leaved’ – are doing a lot of work in these three lines. Remove any one of them and the image changes substantially. That is also so if the shrub is ‘spindly’ rather than ‘spindly leaved’.

ROAD NARROWS
butterfly wing-dust
stuck to the windscreen

We’ve arrived, with the familiar image of a dirty windscreen after a long road trip. After all the looking (and in the case of the museum, not-looking) of the previous sections, our attention is drawn much closer to home. The car travellers aren’t uninvolved observers: we have been doing our share of damage, and our vision is partly obscured by the damage we’ve done. It’s not flies or beetles or cabbage moths (of which we saw a lot on our recent road trip), but butterflies. It would be pushing things to see butterflies here in their mediaeval status as symbols of the soul – it’s not that kind of poem. But butterflies are beautiful, fragile creatures, reduced to wing-dust that we must look through to see in front of us. At least, that’s where my mind goes: an idea that – for me – is in these things, is that there’s no such thing as an innocent observer.

I need to say that I’ve barely touched on one aspect of this book. You can see Jane Gibian’s poems on line at PoemHunter, Jacket2 and Cordite Poetry Review, among other places.

I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for my copy of Beneath the Tree Line.

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Summer reads 5: Claire Potter’s Acanthus

Posted on 13 January 2023 | 1 comment

Claire Potter, Acanthus: New Poems (Giramondo 2022)

Anyone looking for a clear, accessible introduction to contemporary Australian poetry would have trouble finding better than Martin Duwell’s website Australian Poetry Review. Every month, he publishes an informed, thoughtful and helpful review of a recent poetry collection.

I went to his review Claire Potter’s Acanthus because I was despairing of my ability to write coherently about this book, even though I enjoyed it immensely. Reassuringly, his post begins by describing these poems as ‘simultaneously fascinating and challenging’. He quotes from the Author’s Note that accompanied his review copy (and which undoubtedly accompanied mine, but was lost when I packed for my summer away from home):

Many of the poems traverse the clarity of a dream-like state: diverting from an imaginary centre and meandering across strange ground. As with all poetry, fragments matter; figures and objects – as if on the level of the bee – are significant; unintelligible feelings turn into a blueprint language that errs and wanders in order to find a resting place. Nothing in the collection was fixed beforehand, you could say the writing took place in order to think a way through, think about certain things or events that at the time didn’t have any formal presence in my mind . . .

Duwell describes this as ‘a fascinating attempt to make sense of – or to make a whole out of – very disparate poems some of which are extremely strong’. He then goes on to his own fascinating discussion of the poems, with plenty of examples. For a general introduction to the riches of this collection, I recommend his essay.

Having talked about the poetry as challenging, which could be code for ‘unreadable’ but isn’t, it’s even more desirable than usual that I talk about one poem in detail. One that that grabbed and held my attention is ‘The Hidden Side to Love’ (page 25). It was published in the Summer 2016 issue of Meanjin, and you can read it without my commentary at this link. Here goes:

The Hidden Side to Love

All summer, the bees worked 
between bells of laburnum

sockets of foxglove, blades of lavender
-– they saw a task and rose to it

There’s nothing problematic or ‘challenging’ in this economical evocation of a garden scene. There’s a strong sense of place in many of the poems in this book. Claire Potter is from Western Australia and currently lives in London, and though this garden could be in Australia, the setting feels very English. I’m pretty ignorant about plants, and had to search images of laburnum and foxglove. ‘Bells’ and ‘sockets’ capture their appearance nicely. But why ‘blades’ of lavender, which I think of as puffy rather than sharp or straight-edged like a blade, even a blade of grass? It’s an unsettling note: I don’t think it leads anywhere, but it keeps the reader slightly on the alert. 

I busy myself with the washing 
untwisting funnels of sock, boughs of jumper

rosettes of flannel

After the brief description of the bees in the garden, comes this sweet, straightforward metaphor. Bees rise to their task with the flowers; the poet/mother rises to hers in the house. ‘Bells’, ‘sockets’ and ‘blades’ had enough of a suggestion of domesticity to lay groundwork for this leap; now ‘funnels’ suggests a similarity of shape to the sockets of foxglove, and ‘the ‘boughs’ and ‘rosettes’ bring garden images into the house. This comparison of animal and human labour has a long tradition – I think of the famous poem found in the margin of a medieval manuscript (‘I and Pangur Ban, my cat – / ‘Tis a like task we are at’).

In spare moments I put words in the freezer 
reheat coffee, fill inkwells

I stir out hot dinners

Ah, it’s not just the housework. The bee-like work also includes words, ink, quiet time with a second cup of coffee. The transition isn’t clearcut, but almost dreamlike: one minute you’re putting, say, leftovers in the freezer, then you look down and they’ve turned into words. Putting words in the freezer could be a metaphor for taking the volatile medium of speech and freezing it into words on the page. Writing poetry is part of the work being compared to bees’ labour.

But the housework reasserts itself – dinners have to be cooked, and stirred, and by implication put on the table for someone to eat.

Passing along the hall sheaved in light
I imagine a nectarous meadow

I think of waxen wings brought thudding 
to the ground

I look down at my dress and see spikes of burdock 
thistles in plaits hanging to the ground

In the context of the quote from the Author’s Note above, you could say that the simple metaphor of the first six lines is an ‘imaginary centre’. Now the poem moves to a ‘dream-like state’: first ‘I imagine’, and ‘I think of’, then ‘I see’. In the course of these next six lines the poet has come to experience herself as a bee – a giant bee wearing a dress, but still in some dreamy way a bee. All isn’t rosy: bees can be ‘brought thudding / to the ground’. The poet-bee has burdock thistles clinging to her (I had to look them up: they’re spiky). If you had to imagine what the pollen that sticks to a bee’s legs would look like if magnified a thousand times, you could do worse than picturing a head of thistle. As far as I know, however, burdock thistles aren’t a danger to actual bees, but the poem is meandering (as per the Author’s Note), and this giant bee is encumbered by them. Or – if we tie this image back to what we know about actual bees – the stuff sticking to the poet-bee’s dress is somehow part of a greater purpose.

The import of the image of woman with thistles trailing from her dress as she walks down a brightly lit hallway is resolved in the next lines, but before it’s resolved the image has stood in surreal splendour..

Crayons, soldiers, ropes of daisy 
the couch, the doorknob, the stairs –

They all gather to me

So yes, these objects that demand the poet’s attention – children’s toys and other detritus, fixtures and places that need cleaning – cling to her, like pollen perhaps, or like something that will send her thudding to the ground. They are he real-world equivalents of the burdock thistles.

Until I stand and rub my hind legs emphatically 
until I disengage everything

to its proper place

She’s a bee. She rubs her legs together, disengages the pollen and deposits it in the hive where it belongs. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ 

and emerge like a queen

This isn’t a biology lesson. A worker bees can’t become a queen. But a poet-bee can. There’s a sweet mock-heroic tone here: once you’ve got all the cleaning done and everything is in its place, you can have a moment of regal satisfaction. Roseanne Barr used to refer to her sitcom character as a domestic goddess. My first boss, the managing editor of a small publishing company, used to describe herself as managing a household as well as a company. These are achievements not to be dismissed or belittled. What in my younger days we used to call shit-work can actually be a source of great satisfaction, the achievement of beauty and order in one’s environment.

made anew from decades of trying

To hark back again to the Author’s Note, the poem has erred and wandered until it came to a resting place – and then it wobbles. The last line doesn’t negate the triumphant transformation into queenship, but it does apply the brakes a little. This cheerful point of view didn’t come automatically: it took years to arrive at.

But what’s love got to do with it? I think of Kahlil Gibran’s phrase, ‘Work is love made visible.’ (Link to his poem ‘On Work’ here.) The tone of this poem is long way from Gibran’s. For a start, this work is visible only to the person doing it. Other people are implied: someone wore the clothes she sorts, eats the food she prepares, plays with the toys she puts away. These others – presumably a partner and children – aren’t visible to the reader when the work is being done, and by implication the work is invisible to them, hidden. The old feminist slogan, ‘A woman’s work is never done, or honoured or paid for,’ comes to mind. The poem manages to hold Gibran’s epigram and the feminist slogan in place at the same time, neither negating the other.

There’s so much more in this book. But that’s what I’ve got capacity for today.

I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for my copy of Acanthus

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Summer reads 4: Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied

Posted on 9 January 2023 | Leave a comment

Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press 2017)

In the 1990s when Javier Zamora was nine years old, he made his way unaccompanied from El Salvador, evading US border protection, to meet up with his parents who had fled to the US to escape political persecution. He is co-founder of Undocupoets, a group that lobbied to increase opportunity for undocumented writers in the US.

This is his first published book. It’s a collection of poems that revolve around of his harrowing solo journey, including its before and after, not as a linear narrative but mostly in the way memories arise piecemeal: a moment of terror in the desert; recollections of his beloved abuela (grandmother), who he’s unlikely ever to see again; fragments first person narratives from his mother, his father and others; an address to the then newly elected President Trump; moments of longing for his home in El Salvador … I’m not trying to be a smart-arse, but the book is a poetic documentation of the process of becoming what is known in the USA as an undocumented person. In the present time of the poems, he still lives with the possibility of la Migra bursting into his life.

That little boy was unaccompanied when he made his way to the US, but the poetry is alive with relationships. That is, he never lost the sense that there were people who cared about him deeply – the terror was that he might never see them again.

The author photo on the back cover shows a smiling young man, apparently relaxed and confident: Look, he could be saying, I have come through. One poem in the collection, ‘Exiliados’, has that feeling. It appears toward the end of the book, and gathers tremendous emotional force from all that has gone before:

Exiliados
for Monica Sok

The title and dedication do a lot of work. Like most of the Spanish words that pepper the poems, ‘Exiliados’ is easily understood by the non-Spanish speaker. Zamora does us the courtesy of not providing a glossary, leaving us to deal with it if we don’t know his mother language – his own linguistic upheaval is central to the story, and any difficulty we have can only help grasp it. The dedication is to a person whose name comes from a non-English speaking culture. You don’t need to know any more about Monica Sok to get the poem completely, but as it happens she is a Cambodian-American poet whose book A Nail the Evening Hangs On was published in 2020 by the same company that published Unaccompanied. Before we reach the first line, we know that the poem is addressed from one exile to another – exiles at least in the sense that they come from elsewhere and don’t belong to the mainstream white culture.

We didn't hold typhoons or tropics in our hands.
xxxI didn't reach across the table on our first date 
xxxxxxat Cornelia Street Café.

Neither the tropics of El Salvador nor the typhoons of Cambodia are present at this meeting. Both people have left their homes behind. Other poems in the book name places in El Salvador, and when one of those places is unfamiliar to me I feel that that is no surprise to the poet. Here by contrast, when he names the Cornelia Street Cafe, it feels like a name-drop. And sure enough, the cafe has its own Wikipedia entry informing us that it has been voted one of the best places to listen to jazz music. Sadly, and perhaps fittingly in the context of so much pecariousness, the cafe closed down in 2018, after this book was published. But the point here is to establish that the meeting is happening in hip Manhattan.

It’s a date, but the speaker is tentative. His hands, like the hands of the other person, can’t bring his past life to the table. Nor can they reach out to make contact.

xxxxxat Cornelia Street Café. In my humid pockets,

my fists were old tennis balls thrown to the stray dog
xxxof love bouncing toward the Hudson down
xxxxxxto South Ferry.

More New York place names, references to humdrum Manhattan life where people throw dogs to balls and no one lives in fear of armed men in white vans. It’s romcom territory. His fists are sweating in his pockets at the prospect of love, but he’s too much the stray dog to be sure of his welcome.

xxxxxxto South Ferry. We didn't hold hands in that cold

October wind, but the waves witnessed our promise 
xxxto return to my cratered-deforested homeland,
xxxxxxand you to your parents', sometime in the future.

Two exiles, two New York poets, they speak of their homelands and the promise to return.

Then, us in the subway at 2 a.m. Oh the things I dreamed:
xxxa kiss to the back of your neck, collarbone, belly button, there
xxxxxxto kneel and bow my head, then return to the mole

next to your lips and taste your latitude together.
xxxInstead, I went home, you touched my cheek, 
xxxxxxit was enough.

What was a meeting of minds is now embodied, a moment of desire. (I don’t understand ‘latitude’, but I don’t care!) We don’t know if this was the first date that led to an intimate relationship, or if this touch on the cheek is as far as the romantic possibilities of the relationship have gone. Unlike a romcom, the poem isn’t concerned about that. Like many other poems in this collection, it focuses tightly on the moment.

In the first lines, hands were busy doing nothing – not holding places or origin, not reaching out, staying in pockets like old tennis balls that love might find, definitely not holding each other as their owners walked in the cold October wind. Now at last, the woman’s hand has made contact, and ‘it was enough’.

xxxxxxit was enough. I stood, remembering what it's like

to stand on desert dirt wishing stars would fall 
xxxas rain, on that huge dark country ahead of me.

‘The Future is dark,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1915 after a bout of depression, ‘which is the best way the future can be, I think.’ That’s how I read the ‘huge dark country’ here. When the nine-year-old arrived in the USA, and the future could have held anything. Now a young woman touches a young man’s cheek at 2 o’clock in the morning after they’ve talked for hours, and he feels the same sense of a vast unknown ahead, full of promise and possible danger.

This is a book that puts flesh on the bones of the continuing US headlines about the Mexican border, and especially the stories of unaccompanied children caged under President Trump. I don’t know if there has been anything quite like it about asylum seekers in Australia.

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Summer reads 3: Tracy Ryan’s Rose Interior

Posted on 7 January 2023 | 2 comments

Tracy Ryan, Rose Interior: New Poems (Giramondo 2021)

There’s a lot to love in this book from Western Australian poet and novelist Tracy Ryan.

A note on the Giramondo website describes it well:

The poems in Rose Interior move between the inside and outside of everything they touch, from the domestic scene, both cosy and claustrophobic, to the social and ecological settings we must all answer for. Poems from Ireland, Switzerland and Australia consider life at home in the personal sense: through the body, childhood memories and family houses, ‘a room within a dream’. Wherever home lies, it’s always on borrowed time.

It’s the domesticity that most appeals to me – that and the occasional poems about ageing. In particular, as a recent adopter of hearing aids I love ‘Soft of Hearing’, which begin with this brilliant description of what has also been my experience:

The hard edges went
longer ago than you know
as if the crusts of syllables
were trimmed off for your ageing

ears to swallow only
what's soft.

And it only gets better from there.

There are profound poems about bereavement. There’s ‘Ghost Story’, which I take to be about age related cognitive decline:

Sometimes I catch the other me,
elves to shoemaker, who's already
filled the pot with water as I just
turned to do

And I could go on picking out lines to quote. The book is divided into three sections, the third of which is eighteen poems on aspects of the Covid pandemic. With a light enough touch, they bring profound thoughtfulness to home education, zoom backgrounds, bread-making, and other standard Covid themes. To pick one beautifully accessible poem, here’s ‘Post Storm, Still Pandemic’:

In the book, this poem follows ‘Storm in Pandemic’, whose title is a good description of its content. When you read it in that context, this poem’s title is likewise a good summary of the content: the storm is past, but there’s still a pandemic. 

Post Storm, Still Pandemic
Afraid to look outside in case it shatters 
illusions we've come through this. Blinks, 
but power stayed on, the roof has held.
Out there is turmoil, noise, last bluster, yet 
worst has passed.

It’s probably worth mentioning at the start the apparently effortless way (definitely effortless for the reader) that the poem works with a basic line of five beats, not quite iambic pentameter, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, keeping a conversational tone and drawing no attention to its technique.

The first line captures that moment when a severe storm is over, but you can’t quite believe it. The line break after ‘shatters’ creates a fine moment of ambiguity. The reader wonders: In case what shatters? then the new line reveals that the verb is transitive, and non-literal – only illusions are shattered, not windows or indeed the whole world. Then the common phrase ‘we emerge, blinking, into the light’ is evoked by the single word ‘Blinks’, and one by one the elements of normal life are found to be in working order.You almost don’t notice the book’s central motifs of inside and outside, of home being ‘on borrowed time’.

worst has passed. At night, so blurred, 
I couldn't tell wind from rain, bad 
synaesthesia, all colours tossed together 
to make dark. Night was a tunnel, only one 
way through.

I like the way this description of the disturbed night manages to include in just four lines the slightly esoteric notion of synaesthesia (something perceived by one sense being experienced as another), a little colour theory, and the image of time as a tunnel. The density of tropes is a kind of analogue for the eventfulness of the night.

way through. City still stricken, our guilt.
How can we rest and write while others dread?
They tussle with neighbours who haven't 
cleared away or tied things down: Your fence 
is in my pool. Here with gaping space 
between us, it's more like this, direct 
interface: is there a tree on the house, how 
did small ones fare in burrow or nest, what 
in the world is left?

A change of perspective. The poem’s speaker lives in the country – Tracy Ryan’s bio tells us that she grew up in the outer suburbs of Perth and now lives in the wheatbelt. Here she counts her blessings, but not without first acknowledging a pang of something like survivor guilt. City – and suburb – dwellers are so much worse off, at the mercy of improvident neighbours in a severe storm. (I relate to this as a couple of years ago a tree that fell from my yard narrowly missed a neighbour’s rotary clothes line.) In the country, such relatively petty inter-human quarrels aren’t a thing. One’s response is more direct to the thing itself: damage to property, and – another broadening of perspective – concern for the other animals and the environment in general. (Tracy Ryan and her husband John Kinsella have a blog called Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist: I love the way, here and elsewhere in the book, the poet’s principled positions – in this case caring for non-human animals – appear with no hint of moralism or proselytising.) 

in the world is left? On Reunion Island, back 
with the 1918 flu, they say, after the first ravages 
a cyclone came and washed it all away, 
common disaster chasing off a worse.

The perspective broadens again, in space to the far side of the Indian Ocean, and in time to the last great pandemic. This is the first time the Covid-19 pandemic has appeared in this poem, however obliquely. Given the drama of the storm we have forgotten it for a moment.

common disaster chasing off a worse. I hover 
here on the far side of the same ocean,  
wish for truth in it, the notion of harsh  
weather as unexpected cleansing.

And we’re back to the first person singular, in this place, facing – by wishing not to face – the difficulties and dangers of the present. The notion of harsh weather as unexpected cleansing (such a resonant phrase) isn’t always mistaken, but it may have been in Réunion in 1919, and certainly would have been in Western Australia in 2021. The poem knows this, acknowledges that it’s a false hope even while acknowledging its appeal. My mind leaps to the way some of us thought the Covid pandemic itself, harsh as it was, might provide an unexpected opportunity for states and corporations to put aside short-sighted self-interest and rise to the challenge of the climate emergency – another disaster chasing off a worse. But nah!

There are many poems in this book that I hope to read over and again.

I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for my copy of Rose Interior.

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Summer reads 2: The Gleaner Song Lin

Posted on 5 January 2023 | 4 comments

Song Lin, The Gleaner Song, translated by Dong Li (Giramondo 2021)

Song Lin (宋琳) was a campus poet in Beijing in the 1980s, and was active in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, for which he was imprisoned for a year. On his release he married a French woman, and in 1991 went to live in Paris. After spending time in France, Singapore and Argentina, he returned to China in 2003, and now lives in Yunnan province. He has published many books of poetry and prose, including two bilingual French-Chinese volumes, and currently edits the poetry journal Jintian (Today), which ran for nine issues in the late 1970s before being censored, and was revived in 1999.

The Gleaner Song had its beginnings when Song Lin was on a long walk in the countryside of upstate New York with the young Chinese-born poet-translator Dong Li. Describing that walk in his introduction, Dong Li writes:

I saw his eyes light up as a deer leapt from the wild into a wide-open field. As the evening hues shifted farther into the forest, his line of sight followed the deer until it vanished into the night. We talked about the deer, and later he asked me to translate a poem that he had written to record the occasion.

That translation was to become the final poem in this book. It’s preceded by poems spanning four decades and as many continents, incorporating classic Chinese forms and elements of western modernism. Mostly I found it a difficult book, but in interesting ways.

To talk about the difficulty, and why it’s worth dealing with, I want to have a closer look at one poem, ‘Notes from South Xinjiang’. You can read the whole poem, without my commentary, on the Cordite Poetry Review website, where it was published in February 2022.

The rest of this blog post gets a bit detailed. A short version: the poem is a number of brief observations and reflections during a visit to South Xinjiang, the southern part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China, much of which is taken up by the Taklamakan Desert, and most of whose population are Uyghur. It is a prose poem made up of 23 short numbered paragraphs. On a first reading, probably in bed at night, I enjoyed the sense of a mind at play in a new place, but I knew there was a lot I hadn’t understood. Here is what I found when I reread the poem with the internet open beside me:

Notes from South Xinjiang

1. The reckless god reads the braille of the desert.

The poem announces at the start that its subject is a desert. The gist of this first paragraph is clear enough: the shapes made by the wind on desert sands can look like braille, but it would be reckless to read a meaning into them – which by implication is what the poet, godlike, may be about to attempt. But is ‘the reckless god’ someone from ancient Chinese tradition, and would I read the poem differently if I knew? That question remains unanswered.

2. One night in Kupa, I received a telegram from Mars: there were traces of water.

I looked up ‘Kupa’ and found a river in Croatia. But there is a town called Kuqa (or Kuche) on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, so I’m pretty sure that’s where the poet was. Wikipedia gives a long list of variants but ‘Kupa’ is not one of them. Who can blame a copy editor for not picking up what is almost certainly a transcription error, but mistakes like this add a layer of difficulty for the uninformed reader. So the poet is on the edge of the desert which he imagines as Mars-like. There may even be a suggestion that Mars has water where this desert does not. Certainly in photographs it looks vast and dry.

3. Dead rivers look like twisted mummies in the gallery of the sky.

I parse this to mean the dead rivers as seen from the sky – that is, in the gallery of images held in the sky rather than a gallery of images of the sky, which was my first reading. A map of the region shows a network of rivers, with a note to say they are ‘usually’ dry.

Why mummies? It’s not an obvious visual likeness, but it turns out that 4000-year-old mummies have been found in this area. This is the poem’s first oblique reference to the region’s ancient history

4. Language, dust of dust, flies on the long, long road.

I don’t know if the ambiguity of ‘flies’ – is language as insignificant as insects or does it fly away? – is something that happened in the translation, but either way it works well: human activity, especially language, is dwarfed by the desert. This paragraph introduces human activity more explicitly, and specifically the idea of the road, which is taken up the next five paragraphs.

5. An oar stands before the boat-shaped coffin. Sailors of the desert sea, tell me, what kind of sail do you dream of?
6. Business caravans head east, and west. The sun bakes eyebrows, beards, and crusty flatbreads.
7. Go. Once you lie down, you run the risk of being air-dried.
8. From one invisible border to another, I count those disappeared countries.
9. A silkworm once dreamed of Rome; or rather, Rome once dreamed of a silkworm.

These six paragraphs reflect on past human travel in the desert. Paragraph 5: the mummies from 4000 years ago had boat-shaped coffins. Paragraphs 6 and 7 refer to conditions endured by caravans of any era. Paragraph 8: perhaps the poet knows what those disappeared countries are, where those borders were – I don’t, but neither of us needs to know that for the line to work. Paragraph 9 is a lovely evocation of the history of the Silk Roads which passed through this region, skirting the desert (according to this map).

10. Breeze in the dense forest, homonym of silk and porcelain.

This paragraph is an example of what must be a nightmare for translators. It makes no sense as a stand-alone sentence in English. Really, all one can take from it is that some words in a Chinese language sound the same as others. Maybe in the original it’s an elegant pun, or a cute but inconsequential observation. As I can’t read or speak Chinese, I have no way of knowing, and I can’t see how a translator could do other than what Dong Li has done here: translation is impossible. (In other poems, Dong Li explains linguistic play in a footnote, but that’s a bit like explaining the mechanics of a joke – it still doesn’t make you laugh.)

From here on the poem bristles with specific historical and cultural references. It’s as if the poet is wandering abut the region, making random, elegant notes about things he sees. He also, incidentally, challenges the ignorant reader to do a bit of work. Or from another perspective, he points to a number of doors that open on vistas of new knowledge. 

11. The Han princess Liu Xijun – Sappho of Wusun country – was married to a vast and endless homesickness.

Song Lin gives his western readers a small hand by comparing Liu Xijun to Sappho, the earliest woman poet in the western tradition. Liu Xijun wrote one of the earliest poems in Chinese written by a woman. Wusun country, as far as I can tell, was a little to the north of South Xinjiang, but near enough. Liu Xijun’s poem includes the lines, ‘Living here, I long for my land, and my heart aches / Wishing I could be a yellow swan, and return to my old home.’

Having paid homage to traditional Han culture, the poem now moves on to religion:

12. Under the statue of Kumarajiva, I thought: perhaps his intelligible translation saved Buddhism.
13. On their pilgrimage to Chang'an, the three Buddhist masters walked in the opposite direction to the three wise men.

Kumarajiva’s statue is in Kuqa. He was a Buddhist monk of the 4th and 5th centuries of the current era, who translated many Buddhist texts from Sanskrit to Chinese. His translations are still in use today.

Chang’an is the ancient name for Xi’an: I don’t know the story of the three Buddhist masters who – I’m guessing – travelled through South Xinjiang. The reference to the three wise men is another example of Song Lin’s cross-cultural awareness. I read him as suggesting an equivalence between the foundation of Christianity and the bringing of Buddhism to China.

14. If Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty knew that the Ferghana horse was a horse with a disease, would the history of Ferghana be re-written?

At about 100 CE, China imported huge numbers of horses from Ferghana in central Asia, roughly contemporary Uzbekistan, coerced by an army sent there by Emperor Wu. The horses remained popular for the next thousand years. They were said to sweat blood, which – according to Wikipedia – modern authorities believe was caused by the activity of parasites.

15. The donors depicted on the murals have thin eyebrows.
16. Stupa - navigation system of the desert.
17. What a pity! Gan Ying saw the sea but did not know which one he saw.

Paragraphs 15 and 16 are mercifully straightforward, though I don’t know if thin eyebrows have particular meaning in Chinese iconography.

Gan Yin was a diplomat who travelled west in 97 CE in search of Rome, but only got as far the ‘the western sea’, which – according to Wikipedia – could have been the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf. 

18. Petals of the mandala – one five-baht coin after another.
19. The auricle of the crescent rises on the ruins where Xuanzang preached.

Paragraph 18 doesn’t need any extra research.

Xuanzang was a key Buddhist teacher of the 7th century CE. The ancient novel that was the basis of television’s Monkey Magic was a fictionalised version of his journeys. He visited Kuche (now Kuqa) in 630 CE. The crescent of Islam, compared here to an ear, has risen where once actual ears heard him preach.

20. In the dark labyrinth of the karez, flowing water looks for bright vineyards.

This is a beautifully concise evocation of the Turfan Karez System, which consists of 5000 kilometres of wells and underwater channels around Turpan, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. It’s tentatively listed as a World Heritage site.

21. Migration – from Sanskrit to Charian, Uighur to Chinese; over battlefields and millennia of forgetting, Maitrisimit flies into my vision like a phoenix.

Oh dear, I couldn’t find ‘Charian’ online, but Tocharian languages were spoken in South Xinjiang from 400 to 1200 CE. The paragraph should begin ‘Migration – from Sanskrrit to Tocharian’. (Does this mean no one actually managed to read the poem thoroughly when the book was in production?) So the migration described follows the flow of languages that have succeeded each other over the millennia.

According to Wikipedia, ‘Maitrisimit’, full name ‘Maitrisimit nom bitig’ is an Old Uyghur translation of the Tocharian text of a Buddhist drama, which itself (departing from Wikipedia here) is probably from a Sanskrit original. The way the text survives the extinction of language after language is captured in the image of the phoenix (not necessarily a reference to western mythologies, as China too has a phoenix).

This is the poem’s first mention of the Uyghurs, and possibly suggests – ‘Uighur to Chinese’ – that their culture is in the process of being wiped out. Given the necessarily oblique way Chinese poetry has addressed political matters over the last half century, it’s perhaps not too much of a stretch to see this as a disguised protest.

22. Another Uighur muqam: alas the musailaisi wine, the ice-cold beauty, come quickly and rub out my burning desire for you!

The poet has visited the statue of Kumarajiva, some murals, a statue of a Ferghana horse, and so on. Now he relaxes at a musical performance, a Uyghur muqam, drinking musailaisi, traditional Uyghur wine. I’m pretty sure his address to the wine echoes centuries of conventional drinking songs and poems. If there is a protest at the treatment of the Uyghurs, it is thoroughly disguised, but still visible to reader who want to see it.

23. In Kashgar, Shen Wei said to me: there are people wherever poplars grow.

As you’d expect, Kashgar is another city in South Xinjiang. Shin Wei is a poet, younger than Song Lin, who lives in South Xinjiang. So the poem ends on a note of collegiality among poets (an almost Jennifer-Maidenish note). I have no idea what Shen Wei’s remark means. In English the sound play between ‘people’ and ‘poplars’ creates a kind of resonance, and the original Chinese may have a similar play, but that’s a guess.

In the end, I have to resign myself to the reality that not everything in a poem can be translated, and be grateful for as much as does make it across the barriers of language and culture.

I am grateful to the Giiramondo Publishing Company for my copy of The Gleaner Song.

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This is Happiness, Niall Williams and the Book Group

Posted on 8 December 2022 | 5 comments

Niall Williams, This Is Happiness (Bloomsbury 2019)

Before the meeting: When we discussed Niall Williams’s History of the Rain in October, a number of people had also read his next book, This Is Happiness. December’s chooser, impressed by their enthusiasm, decided we should all read it.

The book’s first sentence, ‘It had stopped raining’, which sits on a page by itself, is pretty much identical with the final sentence of the earlier book, and the tiny, backward village of Faha in West Ireland is again the setting, but the bulk of the narrative takes place in an earlier period, and there is no obvious reference to the characters or events of History of the Rain. It’s the story of the coming of electricity to the village; a coming of age story of young Noe, who has taken leave of the seminary and is telling the story as an old man in the USA; and a big romantic story of love lost and found by Christy, an older man who befriend Noe.

Page 75* must be one of the book’s few pages that doesn’t mention the absence of rain. It happens in the thick of one of the book’s comic set pieces. It’s not the set piece when the lights go down and the cinema comes alive with amorous grapplings, or the one where Noe goes to the communion rail at Sunday Mass in order to get a good look at the woman Christy left at the altar, or the spectacular one where he is knocked unconscious by a falling electricity pole. On page 75 Noe and Christy are on the first of a number of epic pub crawls.

These pub crawls are as much about music as about alcohol, music performed by men who are shy and nondescript until they start playing, and then are brilliant conduits of a great folk tradition. On this first adventure, when the evening is well under way, Christy startles Noe and everyone else in Craven’s pub by starting to sing:

Not only was Christy singing, he was singing with screwed-up eyes and fists by his side a ballad about love. He was singing it full-throated and full-hearted and before he had reached the second verse it was clear even to Roo the dog that a passionate truth was present in that place. It wasn’t only that this didn’t happen in Craven’s, it was that there was something raw in it, something deeply felt, that was, even to those who had descended blinking into the umbrae and penumbrae of numberless bottles of stout, immediately apparent and made those who first looked now look away.

(page 73)

Christy has come to Faha as a worker in the great electricity project. This episode is our first inkling of his profoundly romantic reason for signing up for the work. Not so obviously, it prepares us for the major role music is to play in Noe’s story. Page 75 itself is a beautiful piece of misdirection. After Christy has sung, Noe writes:

I did the only thing I could do. I went to the counter and got two bottles of stout.

Those bottles are followed by another two, and then another. Greavy the guard arrives and declares that it’s Closing Time (as Noe says, this is one more way in which Faha lags behind the times), but the two of them are incapable of moving. Alcohol-based humour usually leaves me cold, but Niall Williams’s version made me laugh out loud. I suppose the whole book could be read as an extended Irish joke: the villagers have an almost superstitious awe of the one telephone in town, and the coming of electricity has almost cosmic significance for them. If you read the whole book like that, the stereotypical Irish drunkenness in this passage is representative (including the sly invocation of Waiting for Godot):

Getting up proved aspirational. There was the idea of it, quite clear. Unmistakably clear now. There were hands placed on knees for push-off. There was a Right now. There was another when that failed to produce action. A Right so following. And still nothing. Between thought and verb a vacancy, not intended, but not grievous, just gently perplexed, and in that perplex the realisation that Craven’s was not in fact such a bad place at all, was downright comfortable in fact, in fact there were few places on this earth as agreeable. True? Too true. A person could stay here, could stay right here and be quite happy now, quite, for a very long time. What’s your rush? There’s no rush. All the problems of the world could be settled right here.
Right.
Will we go so?

I don’t want to minimise the book’s humour. Far from it. But there’s a seriousness to it that page 75 gives no clue of. Christy’s romance is genuinely touching. The villagers’ resistance to the coming of electricity is more than comic: and these villagers are described as custodians of their land, defending an ancient culture under siege by capitalism – without being at all heavy handed, the narrative reminds us that the Irish were the first people to be colonised by the English. The dramatic decline in the Catholic Church’s power since the 1950s is deftly evoked both in Noe’s commentary and in his own story: his turning away from his priestly vocation is a tiny reflection of the ending of Church-domination in Ireland at large.

After the meeting: There were seven of us. Covid–19 and other coronaviruses kept some away, while one or two had better things to do – and one sent video of spectacular drone art over Sydney Harbour.

This was our end-of-year meeting so we had other business besides the book, but it generated quite a bit of discussion. The discussion was unusual in that quite a few of us read out favourite passages. Indeed, two of the absentees sent lists of quotes – it’s that kind of book. One interesting insight was that the narrative as we receive it is created by an old man looking back on a key moment in his youth, making a story out of it, and casting a benevolent glow over the community in which that moment happened.

Other business, besides of course the plentiful food including a splendid pavlova, included a Kris–Kringle book exchange with the usual mixture of cautious delight and polite almost-hidden dismay, and a poetry reading. We were each supposed to bring a poem, and most did, even one of the absentees.

Poems were a nonsense poem by CJ Dennis (‘Triantiwontigongolope’), a poem about climate change (that was me – Kit Kelen’s ‘Parable’), a Thomas Hardy (‘Heredity’), a Robert Frost (‘A Time to Talk’), a poem from Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (‘sound and fury’), and two poems of Australian patriotism that couldn’t have been more different (Sara Mansour’s ‘My Australia‘ – link to her performing it on YouTube – and a poem whose name and creator I don’t remember celebrating the lump in the throat brought on by, for example, Anzac Day). This little reading, including by two people who said they felt awkward reading poetry aloud, left us reeling.

And that was a wrap for the Book Group for 2022.

* Currently when blogging about books I take a closer look, arbitrarily, at page 75 – moving on to page 76 at my next birthday if the idea works well enough.

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Kit Kelen’s Bung Mazes

Posted on 27 November 2022 | 3 comments

Kit Kelen, Rompitaj Labirintoj / Bung Mazes (Australian Esperanto Association 2022)

It was my great pleasure to launch the English part of this bilingual book today. The Esperanto part was launched by Jonathan Cooper from the Australian Esperanto Associaton, in an afternoon that also featured Kit Kelen’s’s exhibition of palimpsest works on paper with the same title, plus music, at the Shop gallery in Glebe, all MCd by Richard James Allen. There was music, and a conversation between Kit and Magdalena Ball. Here’s a version of my launch speech.

Rompitaj Labirintoj / Bung Mazes is not the first bilingual poetry book Kit Kelen has been involved in, not even the first bilingual book of his own poetry. But it marks his debut as translator of his own work, both from English into Esperanto and in the other direction as well.

Mostly, unless you’re appropriately bilingual, you can ignore the language that’s not your own when you read a bilingual book. This one isn’t like that. The Esperanto isn’t an added extra. To read the book thoughtfully is to engage with Esperanto, maybe learn a word or two, discover some of its history, and glean some understanding of its underlying philosophy.

It’s easy to see why Esperanto is a good fit for Kit’s poetry. Esperanto, as I understand it, is all about opening channels of communication where none might otherwise have existed. Kit’s work shows a deep commitment to being open to other cultures, other languages, and to other minds. for example, when he asked me to give this talk, he didn’t say, ‘I hope you like the book,’ but ‘I’m interested to hear what you think of it.’

The English versions of many of poems in this book predate Kit’s interest in Esperanto. They cover a wide range of subjects, from the plight of refugees and the climate emergency, to simple celebrations of the natural world and poems about poetry itself. But there’s no great discontinuity between them and the poems dealing explicitly with Esperanto.

One example of these older poems is ‘here’s the story to save the world’, which includes these lines:

what is it keeps us alive?
keep talking
I want to know how the story ends
keep talking
I’ll listen

You can draw a straight line from that to ‘Hitching my wagon to a green star’, a statement of allegiance to Esperanto, which has the lines, ‘we come here for a conversation / while we wait for states to wither away’.

There are poems about learning the language. ‘thank you poem for Trevor Steele’ is explicit:

these lines here are just to say –

thanks for the grammar
I know it must be very annoying –

all the stupid mistakes I make

but how can there be so many accusatives?

Or there’s this from ‘being a humble beginner’:

often I slip
sometimes I slip off the tongue together

This is the poem that most makes me wish I could read Esperanto. What’s the Esperanto equivalent of the mistake ‘slip off the tongue together’? ‘tute glitas de mia lango’ doesn’t tell me anything. It makes me wonder how many references there are that Esperantists get but just sail past me.

Beyond this interest in learning the language, the book engages with its underlying philosophy.  ‘being a humble beginner’ again:

but I’m here for the conversation
I believe that is an art
like leaving the world better than found –
another impossible thing

L L Zamenhof, the language’s creator, is quoted in one of the book’s two epigraphs:

Rompu, rompu la murojn inter la popoloj!

Translation hardly seems necessary, but Google translates it as:

Break, break the walls between the peoples!

‘Bialystok dreaming’ tells how Zamenhof first thought of inventing a neutral second language in Russia in the late 19th century. ‘Suprasegmentals’ makes fun of Chomsky’s declaration that Esperanto is not a language. ‘samideanoj!’ spells out the vision with characteristic Kelenian paradox. It begins:

today we are building a dead language
syllable by syllable, from scratch

it is a tiny country
all between
and never was at all

Esperanto, to paraphrase, has no currency except the people who speak it. Incidentally, this poem stands out for two reasons: the title, meaning ‘like-minded people’ isn’t translated, and the first one-word line  – ‘kamaradoj’ – doesn’t appear in the English. The book is aware of its dual readership.

The poems about Esperanto don’t pull back from its utopian aspirations. In fact they endorse them, but there’s a feeling of astonishment, perhaps even with an edge of amusement, at the vastness of those aspirations. The poems are completely serious, but not self-important.

The two poems that for me are the guts of the book, are ‘shelter’ and ‘bung mazes’. The book has been described as ‘an abstract treatment of the situation of asylum seekers’. The poems celebrating our common humanity, and Esperanto as a way to sharing it, the poems about openness to the natural world and the value of conversation, create a version of the world in which the current treatment of asylum seekers is a cruel absurdity. In ‘shelter’ and ‘bung mazes’, the point is made explicitly.

The title poem ‘Bung Mazes’, begins with a line from the public debate about asylum seekers, ‘everyone knows there is no queue’, and goes on in fifteen short poems to create a kind of maze of its own. I found it the most difficult poem in the book. Sentences don’t finish, images rub up against each other, it’s hard – even maybe impossible – to grasp how some lines hang together. For example:

where you see desert’s edge
a labyrinth in canvas shook

lent to, how it blows off
who’s after you? can it be imagined?

their weapons and the names they call
crime of a clock, dreamt that too

There’s the image of a refugee camp, and a general anxiety is evoked, but it’s hard to pin down a clear meaning. If there is a meaning there, it’s just beyond my grasp (whose weapons? what clock committed what crime? who dreamt what?)

Generally if a poem grabs me, but I don’t understand why, I’ll sit with it, and let it brew in my mind. Sometimes a meaning becomes apparent in the brewing process. In this case, it’s not a meaning, but the effect created by the poem’s elusiveness. In effect the poem, made up largely of unparsable moments like this, gives me a faint inkling of the emotional impact of being lost in the dangerous maze of asylum seeking.

 ‘Shelter’ includes lines that cry out to be quoted:

now they are changing all the world’s weather
island here, river there, tents blow away
tanks shift borders out of the way

big bird flies where it will, drops its droppings

fire now flood now famine war
we were forced to flee

then where to shelter?
in the cave in my head?
but you’ll never get in
there’s never been a queue

there’s a maze
of rules and rights
of yours, not mine
and my turn
never comes

and later:

for the sixty million wandering
this world is a maze gone bung

Sixty million is the UNHCR’s 2015 estimate of the number of people displaced worldwide by wars, conflict, and persecution.

So this is a book about intensely serious subjects.

My mind goes to something Kit wrote almost 10 years ago. Speaking of the problematic nature of writing in the pastoral mode as a settler Australian, he said: ‘The challenge is to have fun while you problematise (otherwise please don’t write a poem).’

This book is fun. Even at its most serious, it avoids ponderousness. It delights in paradox, puns and syntactical playfulness. It always treats the English language – I can’t speak of the Esperanto – as an endlessly enjoyable and challenging playground (‘bung mazes’ is an example; it rejects the obvious English for Rompitaj Labirintoj, that is to say, Broken Labyrinths, in favour of something much less respectful). The poems are full of music, as I hope the bits I’ve read demonstrate.

In this context, fun can be many things. Take the short poem ‘parable’ for example. I loved it at first reading because I felt it brought a much needed lightness of touch to the climate emergency, a step back from the details of rising temperatures, collapsing ice sheets, greenwashing by corporations and governments, and so on. I read it as a kind of wistful fantasy. Then, while I was preparing for this talk, I read it to a friend who’s a climate activist, and it made us both cry – I think because it manages to strike a note of forgiveness along with terrible grief. Here it is. I don’t expect it to make you or me cry today, but just listen to it:

parable

we came from the ice
and out of the trees
and wanted the whole world warmer

we lit fires
and at timber
we were the axe
we were the flame

as if winter were our own forever

we only wanted the whole world warmer

o fearful the dark
but we brought the firelight

the others we’ve eaten by now

we burnt till all of the forest was gone

we came to the clock
that’s where we are now

hard to hear anything
everyone’s in charge
we all follow orders

it’s hard to see how this will pan out
but I predict, in time to come
at the Court of All Spirits
our defence will simply be

we came from the dark
we came from the ice
we wanted the whole world warmer

[It didn’t make me cry when I read it out, and I don’t think anyone else shed a tear either.]

Anyhow:

It’s my honour and privilege to commend this book to you. Buy a copy, and, as the poem ‘keep this book’ says with only a hint of over-selling:

walk with it
sleep with it
read it out loud
quote it at will

I declare Rompitaj Labirintoj / Bung Mazes, the English half, launched.

And here’s a pic of me talking, with Kit’s art in the background and Kit wearing a hat in the corner

Photo by Penny Ryan

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