Tag Archives: poetry

Click Here for What We Do, Pam Brown

Posted on 19 August 2026 | Leave a comment

Pam Brown, Click Here for What We Do (Vagabond Press 2018)

This book was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2019. I must have bought my copy around then. I put it on top of the high bookcase in my room, where it joined the hundred or so books waiting to be read, but unlike some of them (like Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan) it had a strong likelihood of being taken down again. Alas, a slim volume, it slid down behind the bookshelf, where it stayed completely inaccessible until …

… we recently replaced the carpet. We emptied the bookshelves, put their contents in boxes, and moved boxes and bookshelves to another room. The book and I were reunited.

Such an accidental journey into obscurity and back couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate book. Interruptions, distractions, accidents abound in Pam Brown’s poetry. As she says on page 47, in ‘Left wondering’, the second of the four long poems that make up the book:

my attention's
__creaky scatterings assemble

__ __like iron shards 
__patterning around 
a weak magnetic field

It would be hard to find a better way of describing these poems. To read them is to have the sense of being immersed in a consciousness whose attention is scattered – you can feel a pattern forming, being disrupted, re-forming. Each of the long poems is broken up into many short sections separated by an asterisk. It’s often not clear how a section relates to the one before it: it might pick on a word that appears there and criticise it; it might make an associative leap; it might not connect at all. The poems’ speaker goes on plane trips, re-organises furniture in her house, chats with someone over coffee, engages with artists, writers, essayists, and quotes other poets. She is irritated by the ‘nightmarish greensleeves’ of Mr Whippy. It all feels wonderfully familiar to me – not so much the content (I’d never heard of Agnes Martin or Luis Alberto Arellano), as the way one’s mind wanders, hovers. circles, and sometimes gets somewhere. And while it feels spontaneous and random, at the same time there’s discipline in the making of the poems: they are a long way from being formless effusions.

The four poems in the book are ‘Combination soup’, ‘Left wondering’, ‘Susceptibility song’ and ‘A mockery’.

Page 79* is the first page of ‘Susceptibility song’:

It’s a nice, cosy set-up. The poem’s speaker is sitting up late at night, multitasking.

past one a.m.
___ you will have gone to bed

The word you is always interesting in a poem. Maybe at some level it always means the reader. But it also usually conjures up a third person, real or imaginary. If you here signifies a particular person, the poem never identifies them. The effect is simply to place the poem’s speaker in a relationship. Francis Webb once wrote that a poem is a meeting place of silences: the first two lines of this one set it up to be exactly that.

The next section, the rest of the page, expands the scene-setting:

the night like a night
___________ some moonlight 
___________ some indigo to black

sporadic traffic swoosh
__________ no slower than the day

television streaming
___________________ comfortably

an average drama 
______ sound down low__________ 

not watching

reading bits of a book 
_____ making notes

I like ‘the night like a night’. It’s as if the poem starts out intending to give us an evocative simile but then thinks better of it: ‘Nah, it was just a night like any other.’ And gives just a little splash of colour. The qualifiers on the rest of the page emphasise the ordinariness of the moment: sporadic, average, comfortably. She’s not reading a book but bits of one. The television is on, but she’s not watching. It’s a kind of limbo.

A perfect place for the mind to go wandering, and an opening that makes one want to read on.

There are ten more pages.

First, there’s the book the poem’s speaker is ‘reading bits of’, in effect some of the notes she is making. She quotes a line from the blurb,’the discarded ideograms of history’, wonders what it means, decides the word ‘ideogram’ has been used incorrectly, explaining why in a two-word parenthesis – ‘ezra’s dictum’. I’m usually a pretty lazy reader, but because I’m blogging about the poem I looked things up. There are enough details to enable the book to be identified as Avenue (2012) a collection of poems by Michael O’Brien which is online at this link, so that we can read the two poems referred to by this poem; the blurb is by Geoffrey O’Brien; Ezra, of course, is Ezra Pound, who contended that ideograms were valuable as ways to resist ‘the lure of abstraction’, not whatever the blurb says they are.

But it wasn’t necessary to find all that out to enjoy the poem: the speaker picks up on the phrase, ‘the discarded ideograms of history,’ and the rest of the poem takes off on a meandering rumination on memory, history, time, the anthropocene, Queer Theory. She notices (is distracted by?) a spider ‘coating an insect in spittle’. She dreams, and watches TV. She gives some markers of time and place – including that she is writing on the night daylight saving ends, but at 10.52, a different time and presumably date from the opening page. She quotes, with acknowledgement, Yothu Yindi, Ellen van Neerven, Luis Buñuel and Les Murray, among others. Bob Dylan needs no acknowledgement:

tonight
____as I stand
inside the rain

irresolute

susceptible to uncertainty

She lists a number of terrorist killings from the news and then, in a piece of self-questioning that is quintessential Pam Brown:

does 
a list 
like that 
do any work?

____*

that's a question 
__ you've been asking
____for half a century

(wondering
___who'll be swift
________-to chide)

(This you is probably Brown herself, not the person addressed in the poem’s first lines.)

The poem is a wonderful ride, not really an essay, but more than a collection of moments or string of associations. If I seem to be saying nothing particularly clear about it, maybe that’s appropriate. Here’s how it ends, with a reminder that the subject it has been circling is to do with history, memory, finding a way of speaking :

the factual archive
the fatuous archive
____________awaits
the enormous familiar

begin whispering –

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently blue-skied land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Jill Jones’s How to Emerge

Posted on 15 August 2026 | 3 comments

Jill Jones, How to Emerge (Vagabond Press 2025)

Jill Jones is a formidable poet, sometimes thrilling, often difficult, never cliché or dull.

Like many of her previous books, How to Emerge has won awards (including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2026 NSW Literary Awards) and been shortlisted for others (most recently the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, winner to be announced on the 10th of September).

Some quotes from judges’ comments may give you a sense of the poetry, and also of the difficulty of describing it.

From the PM’s Literary Awards (for the full comments, click on the book’s cover at this link):

Advancing by non-propositional proposition, chances and crossings, How To Emerge is an absorbing, elegant collection of poetic numbers operating at the threshold of the personal and the impersonal. In its richly suggestive representation of worldly entanglement, it solicits readers willing to enter into a pact of mutual attention and unpredictable exchange. 

From the NSW Literary Awards (the full comments are at this link):

These poems discover humanity, perhaps even meaning in the accumulating weight of the world; we are star dust, but we are also the brat summer. Part of the appeal of these poems is the rare faith they show in the reader, a belief that readers will find their own meaning and carry from the collection something of the warmth, humour and care that radiates from the poems.

I won’t add any generalisations of my own, except to say that I like the idea that readers have to be ‘willing’ (PMLA judges) and ‘will find their own meaning’ (NSWLA judges).

I’ll just look at one poem, ‘Poem Mourning My Name’, on page 79*.

It has fifteen lines. According to an endnote, all the poems in the book ‘are composed of lines that are multiples of three’. I’m guessing this was a self-imposed restraint, important in creating the poems, but not so much in the reading of them, unless at a subliminal, numerological level.

Before you read on, please stop and read the poem itself, preferably aloud. You’ll get a sense of its flow, its general effect, and if you’re like me, you’ll feel an itch to look more closely, poke around in it, figure out what precisely is happening. The rest of this blog post is an attempt to record some of that looking, poking and figuring.

When I was thinking about the poem, I happened to hear Florence Knapp discussing her novel The Names in a Sydney Writers’ Festival podcast (at this link). That novel tells three life stories, each of the same boy, but he is given a different name in each with massive consequences for how his life goes. And I realised that in various contexts my name has been Jonny, Jonno, Shaw, Shawrie, [offensive nickname deleted], John, Jon, Jacko (just for one weekend) and Jonathan. Names are important, and perhaps everyone can tell a story about theirs.

What if you’re called Jill Jones? I stopped counting when I reached the 200th person with that name on Facebook. This commonness could be what leads to the poem’s opening. Surely, you might think, if your name is a marker of your untransferable individuality, it must be more distinctive than that. In my reading of the poem, that’s the starting point – the fantasy that behind the everyday name there is another, ‘real’ name:

What is my real name, is it a name of the dead 
___ something to fling off like an old coat, a translation 
of a dream, a river, a fairytale, a rock or tree?

Is it too hard to remember, or a joke that's barely 
___ cute? Is it a message someone deleted? It's strange 
on my tongue, like an old lover, a lack of neatness.

As in many of Jill Jones’s poems, these lines are full of allusion. Some people are named after dead ancestors, or from a parent’s dream. Fairytales about names abound – I was just telling my grandson about Rumpelstiltskin this week. There’s a popular belief that in some cultures babies are named for the first thing the mother sees after giving birth – a rock or tree. And there’s a joke that’s ‘barely cute’ that relates to that belief – which I won’t tell here because I try to keep the blog family friendly.

While this play is going on, a different understanding of the opening question swims beneath the surface. Is a name something other than an arbitrary word used to identify the person? Is a real name an inversion of what the trans community calls a dead name? In the second triplet, that unease comes closer to the surface: the deleted message, the strangeness on the tongue, the awkwardness of an old lover, something that doesn’t fit though maybe it did once in a time that’s forgotten.

It is this imagined-forgotten name that is being mourned.

The next lines, coming after after a visual break, are a kind of prayer.

Call me by the name I was, tell me I'm part of a pattern 
___the constellations, some kind of DNA.

Was I once a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a red red rose?

The ‘real name’ has become ‘the name I was’: it’s more than a label, it’s a metaphor for lost identity, a way of understanding the speaker’s place in the universe, but one that’s in the past. We name stars by their place in constellations. DNA is a deep identifier. But the last line here does a kind of twist. After a glancing, fanciful reference to reincarnation, it pulls back from that rabbit-hole and allows a rose to enter the poem. In European poetry, a rose can’t be mentioned without invoking a long tradition: here the phrase is taken from Robert Burns (‘My love is like a red red rose’) but it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare (‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’) and Gertrude Stein (‘A rose is a rose is a rose’), both of which, with their understanding that names are arbitrary, oppose the main argument.

After another visual break, the poem makes a new start, perhaps responding to that skepticism:

I can breathe without my name, that's good, so it's not 
___ something I need tell anybody. Not even as a story 
forged awkwardly. And no-one has come anyway.

But it's still something to hide away, a riddle half-buried 
___ by a loch that's too narrow, too deep. Even underneath
where there are signs, there are layers and bones.

A paraphrase: Assuming that there was a real name in the past, I don’t need it to go on with life; I don’t even need to tell anybody, and that’s just as well as no one would want to hear me anyhow. But …

Is this what the PMLA judges meant by a ‘non-propositional proposition’? Maybe it’s nonsense to think I had a ‘real’ name, now lost, and that knowing it would reveal something essential about myself. But somehow the idea won’t go away: it lingers in some half-buried part of consciousness.

There’s a fresh twist in the last sentence. The poem to this point has been a lament for a lost name, a lost sign. But even when there are signs, it says,there are layers of meaning in them. (Which brings me back to the stories I could tell (perhaps awkwardly) about the variations on my own unforgotten and unmourned name.

Through all of this strangely abstract rumination, there are things: a coat, a river, a rock, a tree, a fish, a horse, a sparrow, a rose, and in the end bones.

We keep being told that there’s a crisis in our culture to do with shrinking attention spans. A remedy that’s often suggested is to read long-form writing like novels. A poem as short as 15 lines can also invite – and reward – sustained, active attention.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the currently cold, wet land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Toby Fitch’s Ill Lit Pop

Posted on 7 August 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Fitch, Ill Lit Pop (Flying Island Poets 2018)

There’s a thing in contemporary poetry where a poem is created by doing something to another piece of writing. A mechanical example is n+7, in which every noun in the original passage is replaced by the seventh noun after it in the dictionary. Depending what dictionary you use, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ might become, ‘Fringes, romps, courage, lend me your earshot.’

There are other, less mechanical techniques. In a cento, a form that has been around for a very long time, each line of the new poem is made up of a line from another poem. There are erasures, cut-ups, flarf (see Wikipedia description here), and more. They can be fun and challenging to do, and the results can be intriguing, hilarious, or sometimes just plain mystifying to read.

Toby Fitch does a lot of that kind of thing. His book before Ill Lit Pop was The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press 2016) – say its name aloud and you might realise that the book has something to do with Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. In 2021’s Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, my blog post here), he applies N+ 7 viciously to some Scott Morrison’s speeches.

Ill Lit Pop includes similar play. An end note lists ‘sources’ for each of the book’s 21 poems. They all do something to – or with, or through – other pieces of writing. The ‘sources’ include Kurt Cobain, Ice House, Taylor Swift, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake. If my reading of the book’s title is correct, it suggests that many of the poems take pop lyrics and make them obscure, as in poorly illuminated pop music.

Probably the poem that speaks most directly to me is ‘Let’s Dance’ [or, as the contents pages puts it, ‘Let’s Dance (da da-da-da da-da-da)’], a more or less traditional poem responding to David Bowie’s fabulous video of his song by that name. It begins:

It wasn't Stravinsky's rite of spring
to plonk Uluru on his album cover
but it led Bowie to the beach-blonde pub
summer dance-off

To read the rest of the poem you’ll have to find a copy of the book. You can see the video at this link.

In the less traditional poems, I generally find myself bemused.

Page 47* will give you a taste. It’s the last page of ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, which has the explanatory subtitle ‘(A bad lip reading of Rimbaud)‘. The note on sources names ‘selected lines of Le bateau ivre, Arthur Rimbaud’.

I think I get the idea of bad lip reading. Here’s how I imagine this poem was created. Toby Fitch watched someone perform Le bateau ivre, probably in the original French, with the sound turned down, and wrote words in English that roughly fitted what he saw. Then, I’m guessing, he read through what he had written and selected the bits that looked interesting, tidied them up a bit, and perhaps nudged them towards some kind of meaning. Maybe it’s a process a little like reading tealeaves or playing with a ouija board. Or like interpreting dreams – the lipreader’s unconscious mind surely has a role in deciding what words to see.

I don’t think there’s much point to reading it alongside Rimbaud’s poem – I tried and failed. The title, ‘Evening of the Bot Man’, could be a tidied-up version of ‘the bot man’s evening’, which is a plausible bad lip reading of ‘le bateau ivre’. Such comparative reading for the rest of the poem would be a lot of work, and probably not very productive. So the poem needs to be read in its own right.

In the first four pages, nothing makes obvious sense, but there are some wonderful surrealist phrases.A random sample includes ‘tweeting pics / of the cooked black rain’, ‘icy poles exalting / among purple columns of lard’, or ‘July fizzing w/ quadrupeds’. But a narrative thread emerges from the apparent chaos. The poem is addressed to someone, and the speaker has done something he regrets:

a single sexy night saw me regret
___________________________the fallout of my life
's pleasure dome
__________________________u shivered non-plussed
the Furies all slow-clapped
our marriage

Such is the nature of the piece that as I read I wondered if it was me or Toby Fitch who decided that was part of a through narrative line. Whichever, oncec I’ve seen it, it’s definitely there, and the poem continues with self-recrimination and perhaps some excuse-making.

So these final lines, on page 47, read almost coherently, beginning with a meta moment:

_______love needs a narrative to absorb

People need narratives – and the nominally arbitrary process of bad lip reading has urned one up.

_______the moon is atrocious w/ its solar mains
you & i both know
__________________desire is beastly in the flesh

These lines invoke the biblical phrase, ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ putting it in an astronomical rather than theological context – the moon in relationship to the sun. ‘There’s a hint of forgiveness in ‘you and I both know’. And so …

& so we're content
______________all the better to awkward you w/
night-night selfie
___________________________on the bed next to me
_________yr disappointment eyes

The issue – arising from that ‘single sexy night’ – is not resolved. Things are still awkward. The speaker and his spouse have reached an awkward detente. Disappointment is still there, but so is contentment.

None of which has anything to do with the Rimbaud’s most famous Symbolist poem, whose surface narrative is all about a boat sailing drunkenly down a river. Rimbaud has provided the text from which the new text has arisen. If you can find the poem I’d love to hear other people’s readings of it.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, on beautiful Yunbenun (aka Magnetic Island). I acknowledge their Elders past and present, including their sustained struggle to have the island’s long history acknowledged, and I welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79. When a book has fewer than 79 pages, as this one does, I look at page 47, the year of my birth minus 1900.

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Laurie Duggan’s Kite Hangs above the Border

Posted on 22 July 2026 | Leave a comment

Laurie Duggan, A Kite Hangs above the Border, translated into Chinese by Chris Song and Matthew Cheng (Flying Island Books 2022)

Flying Island Books are published jointly by ASM and Cerberus Books. The first of those publishers is based in Macao, the second in Markwell, a rural community in New South Wales whose population in 2021 was 144. The series consists mostly of English-language poetry, but there are a number of bilingual books, mostly bringing Chinese-language poets to Australian readers. This is the second book I’ve read that reverses the flow. The first was Geoff Page’s Codicil (link is to my blog post), which was translated, like A Kite Hangs above the Border, by Hong Kong poets Chris Song and Matthew Cheng. This book, like that one, may act as a taster to potential Chinese readers. For readers who can’t decipher Chinese characters, it offers the intriguing experience of seeing what the poems look like in translation. And given that many non-Chinese readers won’t have read much of Laurie Duggan’s poetry, it’s a taster for us as well.

I’ve written longish posts about Duggan’s work here and here, which I’ve just reread and can recommend if you want a bit of background.

This book includes a number of poems from his two long-running series, Blue Hills and Allotments. Both series reflect the influence of classic Chinese poetry: they are often sharp, minimalist evocations of a moment in time in a particular place, generally Australia in Blue Hills and England in Allotments. For instance, the opening lines of ‘Blue Hills 86’:

_______________________a rectangle of sky
lights the kitchen bench

shadows of screeching corellas
cross this space

(Intriguingly, it takes 16 characters to translate the seven words of that second couplet there, six for ‘cross this space’ alone.)

There are satirical comments on current events, poems about poetry, travel poems, all quietly self-effacing and sometimes sharply witty.

Pages 78–79* feature one of the travel poems, ‘Catacombs’:

It’s interesting to notice that the word ‘catacombs’ needs four characters in Chinese, and that the last three couplets resemble each other visually in a way the English don’t (and seeing from a quick run through Google translate that this visual effect seems to be deliberate).

I thought I knew about catacombs before reading this poem. I’ve visited the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, Portugal (and ventured a little verse translation of my own, at this link), and the Hypogeum in Malta. Neither those, nor photos from the Paris catacombs, fit these lines. But a quick search turned up the Cappuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which the TripSavvy website says are ‘not recommended for the squeamish or for children’. It’s as if this poem condensed out of the air of that place.

If you’re not the squeamish type, you might like to watch this short video about the Palermo catacombs. But do read the poem first. It’s short lines – using fewer words than the video – create a visual sense of the place and allow its emotional resonances to hang lightly about the words.

The poem is in three parts. First, a general description:

They grin or howl, 
heads twisted from bodies

each hangs forward 
unsupported by neck muscle

There’s initial shock of the grinning or howling skulls. Is it that some grin and others howl, or is the poem undecided whether to describe them as grinning or howling? It doesn’t matter which way you read it, that ‘or’ holds you back from a pure horror movie response. The second couplet has a cool, practical feel. There’s a simple anatomical cause for the potentially horrible twisting in the first couplet: there is no neck muscle.

The second part notices the range of corpses. I’ve just spent some time reading about these catacombs, and I am in awe of Duggan’s restraint in not mentioning the child corpses, especially the beautifully preserved two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo. That would be a different poem. This one focuses on what amounts to class:

some in bow ties 
some in moth-eaten trousers

those in the professions 
have their own aisles

those of the cloth 
the darkest spaces

Incidentally, I ran the translation through Google translate, and the bot’s version of Chris Song and Matthew Cheng’s translation of ‘those of the cloth’ is ‘the commoner’, that is, the couplet refers to common people rather than the clergy, so whether by the machine or by the weird interplay of languages, class looms larger in the translation, or at least in the retranslation of the translation.

And then the observation:

all are covered 
by thick dust

The poem has no need to spell out the metaphorical resonance here (‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, and so on). As the US poet said, ‘No ideas but in things.’ The absence of punctuation at the end leaves it up to the reader – we can take it as implying a rumination on death as the great leveller, or simply let it stand as a tourist’s note.

So that’s a taste of a taste. Having written this far, I’ve picked up my copy of Homer Street (2020) and am browsing happily as I press ‘Publish’.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Damien Becker’s Thin Reed Throat

Posted on 3 July 2026 | Leave a comment

Damien Becker, Thin Reed Throat (Flying Island Poets 2026)

This book won the 2024 Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets. It makes me happy that the prize exists as a means to getting such a beautiful work into print.

According to the ‘About the author’ note, Damien Becker’s poetry ‘draws on a lifetime of chronic illness, living with cystic fibrosis, and as a double lung transplant recipient’. The book isn’t anything like a novel in verse, but the poems are arranged to form a kind of narrative, so that the reader is invited into the world of children living with cystic fibrosis, where they attend the funerals of friends and are prepared for an early death themselves; into the social experience of living with cystic fibrosis as an adult; into hospital life; and in a wrenching series, into the story of a double lung transplant and its aftermath.

After my first read of the book, I looked up a cystic fibrosis website where I read a number of ‘transplant stories’. They tend to focus on the practicalities – how soon or late to apply for a transplant, how to prepare, what to expect physically and emotionally. They talk of the before–after difference and have a recurring theme of gratitude. What Damien Becker does is make rich, profoundly moving poetry about the experience. One of the book’s last poems ‘A Letter, Delivered on the Sydney Opera House Stage’, begins, ‘Dear daughter of my organ donor.’ He did indeed perform a version of it at the Australian Poetry Slam National Final at the Sydney Opera House in 2019:

If you’ve watched the video, you’ll agree that the last line – ‘The voice that will fill the air will be strong, and will be mine’ – works powerfully in a spoken-word poem, where the voice it names is the slightly laboured, vulnerable voice that we hear. It works just as powerfully on the page, where previous poems have made shown us the difficulty of breathing with lungs that desperately need replacing.

This is a book of poetry that opens doors in the mind and heart.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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Kit Kelen’s Food of Love

Posted on 24 June 2026 | 2 comments

Kit Kelen, Food of Love: concert pieces / 101 poems (Flying Island Poets 2026)

‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ Anyone who did the Queensland Junior exam in 1962 will recognise that as the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which we read with commentary at least four times over the year. (Oddly, though I was in a class of 15 year old boys, I don’t remember any sniggering about the play’s gender-based comedy, but that’s another story.)

Each of the 101 poems in this pocket-sized book includes the name of a piece of music as a subtitle, and often the combination of title and subtitle could stand as a poem by itself. For example, ‘placating a serial killer / Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”’ or ‘we sing what the ghost sings / “Waltzing Matilda”’. Just the titles give joy. My favourite title-as-mini-poem is ‘trout as earworm / Schubert’s “The Trout”’.

Most of the music is classical, but the book casts a wide net – ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and the theme tune from The White Lotus both get a guernsey.

What the poems do with their musical ‘sources’ varies widely. They might describe the music, as in the first line of ‘at the castle keep / Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bare Mountain”’ (page 38):

great insect or whirr of the orc hoard

They might enlarge on the music’s theme or narrative – as in ‘the cloud sorter’s dream / Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”’, or ‘numanah numananah and where are we now / Ron Grainer’s Dr Who theme’ (page 103):

someone must yet invent this planet

they have already in time to come
in time for supper sometimes

Some play with the associations the music has gathered over its lifetime – so Rossini’s Barber of Saville has inspired ‘on the occasion of Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday’.

There’s nothing obvious or facile in the way the poetry does these things. At the book’s Sydney launch at the Addison Road Writers’ Festival last month, Peter Boyle described Kit Kelen’s poetry as ‘cubist’. Whether or not you know the relevant music, you have a sense that the poem is looking at it from a number of points of view – bouncing off it, coming back at another angle, sometimes going off and doing its own thing. This can make for difficulty, even incomprehensibility, but there’s pleasure in it.

I usually single out one poem when I write about a poetry book. Here, rather than my arbitrary choice of page 79 (my age), I’m looking at page 101 (may I live so long): ‘Cordelia’s song / John Cage’s 4’33”’:

I love the pairing in the title. In case you need reminding, Cordelia is King Lear’s favourite daughter who, when asked what she can say about her love for him, replies, ‘Nothing, my lord.’ In case you also need reminding, the score John Cage’s ‘4’33″’ instructs the musicians not to play their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. They are two great Nothing moments, where the ‘nothing’ is rich – Cordelia will not speak because to do so would belittle her love; Cage, as I understand it, invites the audience to attend to the unscripted music of life itself.

The poem proceeds in the manner Kit Kelen has made his own. There are sentences whose subject is understood, and sentences that stop as soon as enough has been said for the reader to know (or guess, or invent) their endings. Syntax is just slightly out of kilter. Punctuation is scarce, which leads to teasing ambiguities. Language is made strange, but it stays friendly.

What I like most about the poem after a number of readings is the way its apparently fragmentary nature comes together into a deeply satisfying whole.

Take the first couplet:

imagine just inside your scone 
(rarely gets airplay)

A prose paraphrase might be: ‘Imagine what’s going on inside your head, and only that. It’s something that you rarely pay attention to.’ But ‘scone’ is more interesting than ‘head’ – apart from the effect of its slangy informality, it implies the thinking mind as well as the physical head. And ‘airplay’ is more than attention: with Cage’s composition in mind, the word suggests that the piece allows what’s in your ‘scone’ to be heard as if in a concert: the random thoughts as well as the tinnitus (or whatever people who don’t have tinnitus hear in their ears).

The second triplet places us in the concert hall:

face all emotion, one would expect 
conductor's hands open 
as if she/he would receive

Well, not exactly in the concert hall. The book is dedicated ‘for everyone at ABC Classic FM, for all you have taught me over many years’. The dominant voice of the book isn’t that of a concert-gooer, but of a music-listener. This line implies that the poem’s speaker has not seen the piece performed. ‘One would expect…” The beautifully evoked image of the conductor about to begin has a mildly ironic flavour here.

We shift again in the next line, to an abstract reflection on the piece, placing it, perhaps, in the context of Eastern meditation practices:

the effort at nothing in mind

The next couplet takes another leap altogether, into pure, tantalising, paradoxical nonsense, about which I have nothing to say:

imagine a funnel the planet falls through 
and that's the proof – imagining!

As I read it, the next few stanzas are versions of what goes through this listener’s mind during the piece. First, he realises that the absence of played music is not the same as silence, that there is never silence (the contorted syntax – ‘there is no ever’ – creating the effect of a thought being reshaped as it forms), that instead of silence there’s hush in which the sound of a distant bird can be herd, and the sound of what feels like your own brain at work:

there is no ever silence 

there's hush and through the wall 
some far bird breaks the day

you will think it is the mind's mechanics

As with any experimental art, derisory voices are heard, and responded to. 

could do this in your sleep 
and I do

This couplet reminds me of Alice Miller’s discussion of Picasso’s late paintings in her wonderful collection of essays on the role of trauma in creativity and destructiveness, The Untouched Key. People might look at those paintings and say, ‘A four year old could do this.’ Miller argues that it took genius create something with the simplicity that comes naturally to a four year old. Here, ‘You could do this in your sleep,’ is meant as a similar slur, but the response ‘and I do’ turns it into praise – the piece does something that most of us can only do when sleeping.

Then another resistant comment. Who hasn’t thought when faced with a piece of conceptual art, ‘I see the idea, I don’t need to see it played out’? 

this theory's already proven 
no need to show it off

In response, the poem takes off, with one couplet and four one-line stanzas, groping to put words to the experience of listening to Cage’s piece. It’s worth paying attention to pronouns. So far, there has been ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. Now it is ‘we’. 

a melody commences
here where we’ve never met before

it’s only the world turning we hear

it’s just this old hat for a head

here’s the answer to a prayer

Each of those stanzas takes a different tack: perhaps it’s a pause at the start of something new; perhaps it’s a chance to think about our place in the cosmos; maybe it’s just something comfortable and undemanding (though ‘this old hat for a head’ refuses to be tied down to a specific neat meaning); perhaps it’s a quiet sense of spiritual presence. Maybe it’s all of those. Whatever:

an orchestra’s required

An orchestra and being part of an audience. It’s a lovely paradox: to be silent and imagine ‘just inside your scone’, an orchestra is required.

I’m reminded of a passage from David Malouf’s essay ‘Being There’, which could well have had Cage’s piece in mind:

All those elements of noise out of which organised sound arose – the street noises we have just stepped away from, voices in the foyer, the whispers and shuffling before the conductor is quite ready, the slight disturbance of the air that is created by 2000 men and women breathing, even the occasional cough, that substratum of undifferentiated sound against which made music has to assert itself, and against which we bring ourselves to attention. Somehow, to experience the fulness of what music offers we have all to be there. Presence is everything.

I think David Malouf would have enjoyed this poem.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently blue-skied land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Toby Davidson’s Grand Reopening

Posted on 17 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Toby Davidson, The Grand Reopening (Puncher & Wattmann 2025)

I know Toby Davidson mainly as a Francis Webb enthusiast. He did a beautiful job of editing the Collected Poems (UWA Publishing 2011) and has organised an annual Francis Webb reading for more than a decade.

Toby is also a poet in his own right. The Grand Reopening is his third collection. My blog post about his first, Beast Language, is at this link.

The Grand Reopening is a post-Covid-lockdown book. There are poems featuring haircuts, live-streamed funerals, the Great Resignation, ambivalence about going to the pub and the theatre. There are poems about crank conspiracies and an ‘Aussie Nazi’.

These poems are engaging, and they reward repeat reading, but the one that stands out has nothing to do with Covid. ‘His Blood Whisper Scolds the Deathless Intelligence’, a poem in sixteen parts, accounts for nearly half the book. It features Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome (KPS), a rare congenital condition which, according to a helpful note:

affects limbs, especially legs, and is characterised by cutaneous capillary malformation (‘port wine stain’), higher temperature, variable or overgrown veins, tissue, bone and the internal sensation of pronounced or incompetent circulation.

The poem picks up on the word ‘pronounced’. Its speaker is a ‘slewed susurrus / spokeswhisperer / for the Syndrome’. The ‘Deathless Intelligence’ that it scolds is something like divine inspiration – creativity that comes and goes.

At the book’s launch last year, Toby Davidson said that he lives with KPS. So the poem’s narrative elements, mainly dealing with medical interventions and the experiences of ‘Child-He’, are autobiographical or at least autobiography-adjacent. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man living with KPS, with the device of Syndrome-as-narrator allowing for distance and so reflection on meaning. In a back cover blurb, Kevin Hart says that this poem ‘enters the mind and heart and simply will not leave’. I agree.

Page 79*, happily, falls in the middle of this wonderful long poem. It’s the first of Section XII’s two pages:

The first thing you’ll notice is the patterning of words on the page. The whole poem is structure this way: in stanzas made up of three short lines, with alternate stanzas indented. The effect is of a slow heartbeat, a hypnotic to-and-fro, an expectation of call-and-response that is never consistently met but never totally disappointed. It reminds me of the way religious communities recite the Psalms antiphonally: the sides of the chapel recite/chant alternate lines. On this page you can see the call and response pattern in pairings like: ‘he’d learn’ / ‘I taught’; ‘spot’ / ‘piece’; ‘not a soul’ / ‘not even’; ‘floated’ / ‘leapt’; then ‘leapt’ /’raised his foot’.

The overall narrative moves along in this poem. Where previous sections have dealt with diagnostic and other medical interventions, here the whisperer takes the credit for the un-intrusive, non-surgical intervention of compression. Venosan compression stockings (they exist, I looked them up) bring relief. Paradoxically, and antiphonally, the sea brings relief in its vastness – but the main narrative of this section is about the discovery that that relief is temporary. In an earlier section, Child-He realises he can be alone, unaccompanied by the Blood Whisper, only in his dreams. Here he goes swimming alone, telling no one. On the next page he looks at the foot raised at the end of this one:

and it was shrunken,
bloodless, obscene,
wrong in his mind
_____________unrecognisable.

The emotional impact of the incident is summed up in the lines:

so much
_____________for being normal

The narrative conveys with a gut-punch something of the emotional reality of growing up with a congenital condition. The poem has other interests as well. What to make of this?

_____________not even the 
_____________Deathless
_____________Grand Pooh-bah
who co-wrote,
like I did, his best 
sacramental poems...

(The Deathless Intelligence collects a number of nicknames. The Gilbertian ‘Deathless Poo-bah’ is as disrespectful as they get.)

The Blood Whisper’s assertion that it is co-author of ‘his poems’ is part of what makes the long poem so engrossing. It’s not a simple body–mind opposition. The poet has two co-authors. One is the Deathless Intelligence, something like the traditional concept of a Muse, or the Christian tradition’s divine inspiration. The poem reaches for an understanding of how the physical reality – in this case a syndrome affecting the circulation – can also contribute to the creative process.

I’m a long way from grasping this poem. I’ll keep coming back to it. I’d love to hear in the comments from anyone who has engaged with it.

But that’s all I’ve got time for now.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve 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.

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Pam Brown’s text thing

Posted on 29 April 2026 | 3 comments

Pam Brown, text thing (Little Esther Books 2002)

Since 1972, Pam Brown has published 23 books of poetry and almost as many chapbooks (chapbooks are tiny books of poetry, mostly too small to be given an ISBN). She has won major prizes, been an editor including for Jacket and Overland, and is a generous reader of other people’s books.

I enjoy her poetry, but I’m perplexed when it comes to writing about it. Before sitting down to write about Text Thing, approximately her eighteenth book, I looked back over my blog to see what I’d already written. It turns out there’s quite a lot, much revealing the extent of my ignorance about contemporary poetry. If the spirit moves you to read them, here are links to my encounters with Selected Poems 1972–1981, True Thoughts (2008), Home by Dark (2013), Missing Up (2016) and Stasis Shuffle (2021).

There are plenty of places you can go for illuminating accounts of Brown’s poetry. I especially like her 2003 interview with John Kinsella in Jacket2 where he memorably suggests that she has created her own subculture. Among many interesting things in that interview, she says something that’s relevant to page 79* of this book. Referring to the way her poems often include the names of friends without explanation, Brown says:

The … thing is that they’re signifiers. And somehow it’s also a call for community. That sounds corny and old-fashioned but poetry is a marginal art and we’re like the black market of culture — it lends a freedom to do that… include real people, names…

The poem that begins on page 79* is ‘The Night’:

And there are three lines over the page:

nothing cosy
about you.

(curses!)

This poem is uncharacteristically straightforward. Including the title, it consists of a single sentence whose syntax is almost simple enough to meet a primary schoolteacher’s specifications, followed by a one word exclamation. The poem’s speaker eats a pickled onion and is reminded of a friend (or perhaps a frenemy or a former lover?). She indulges in a little rant addressed to that person.

It makes me laugh and I’m not exactly sure how.

Maybe the poem invites me to imagine it being read by the person it’s addressed to. Would she/they (I’m assuming it’s not a man) be amused? Defensive? Dismissive? Retaliate in a poem of her own?

Having now read it a number of times, I realise that there’s quite a lot going on.

The night

Denis bought
Ken's painting 
of a barcode
I ate a pickled onion

This opening clause sets the scene. I imagine the opening night of an art exhibition in a small gallery. Art is on sale and there are snacks, including pickled onions. ‘Ken’ is almost certainly Ken Bolton, poet and painter, named on the imprint page as the publisher of this book artist Ken Searle [see comment from Ken Bolton] . ‘Denis’ is probably a real person too, but his identity doesn’t matter, any more than that of the poem’s ‘you’ does. What does matter is that all four people in the poem – ‘I’, ‘you’, Ken and Denis – are on first-name terms, and seem to belong to some kind of creative community – perhaps Brown’s ‘black market of culture’. Only when I read the poem out loud (to the long-suffering Emerging Artist) did I realise that there’s a lovely contrast between the briefly mentioned masculine, transactional world of buying and selling where even the artwork is an emblem of commerce, and the feminine, relational world of the rest of the poem.

I ate a pickled onion 
& thought of you 
you sourpuss

Is it ridiculous of me to compare Brown’s pickled onion to Proust’s madeleine? Probably. But the taste of this pickled onion, like the smell of the madeleine, transports the poem’s speaker from the external world to the internal one of emotion-charged memory. The word ‘sourpuss’ explains the connection. Then there’s something disarming in the string of qualities, each introduced by an ampersand, with the attention-grabbing words ‘squeam’ (which Merriam-Webster says is a back formation from ‘squeamish’) and ‘demotics’ (which in this context I take to mean the adoption of working-class manners and language, like a recent Australian Prime Minister giving himself an Aussie-sounding nickname). There’s a nice comedy in the transition from criticising an off-putting quest for power and calculated manner to a silly schoolyard insult: 

& your
squeam-inducing 
quest for power 
& your 
fake demotics
& your 
too big 
plastic hairpin 
which doesn't
suit you

You almost expect that to go ‘which doesn’t / suit you / anyway‘ with a teenage emphasis. The first two insults carry the ring of truth. The third reflects back on the speaker.

Learned people refer to Pam Brown’s gift for sprezzatura, a casual appearance that conceals the work that went into it. The veering off in the next line – the fifth to start with an ampersand – is a nice example. I can’t read the opening ‘& also’ without thinking of an angry teenager. Brown’s world of allusion is almost certainly more sophisticated than mine – but I think of Mary-Anne Fahy’s gum-chewing Kylie Mole from the 1990s. (Come to think of it, this book was published in 2002, so Kylie Mole may well have been in Brown’s mind.) So it feels like an easy, natural follow-on from the big plastic hairpin. Then, as if it’s a perfectly natural next step, the poem turns into an intimate attack:

& also
you don't know 
how to
warm eggs
on the outside

Well, maybe it’s not explicitly intimate, but the lines do suggest a shared domesticity in the past. I’m not sure what it means to ‘warm eggs / on the outside’. This conjured in my mind in image of hands holding eggs gently, imparting body heat to them. Why anyone would want to do that, or why not knowing how to do it was a moral failure wasn’t immediately clear. Then I reflected that if you’re baking a cake, a pavlova, or even an omelette, it’s a good idea to let the eggs warm up for a while ‘on the outside’ of the fridge: so there’s a practical meaning. But – for me at least – the image of motherly, protective, feminine warmth persists. And that justifies the final twist of the knife: 

because there's
nothing cosy
about you.

I’m not usually one to notice perfectly conventional punctuation, but I love that full stop at the end. Back in 2002, Millennials probably weren’t yet expressing horror at Boomers’ ending text messages with a full stop, which they saw as unreasonably aggressive. This one fits their reading perfectly.

The full stop may the end of the rant, but it’s not the end of the poem:

(curses!)

The exclamation is a response to everything that has gone before. I love how many ways it can be read: ‘(Did I really just say that?)’, ‘(Do I still have all these feelings about her?)’, ‘(I was having such a nice time before I bit that pickled onion!)’, ‘Why did I ever let her into my life?)’. Or: ‘(And now I hurl curses in your direction!)’, ‘(I’ll sum it all up in the one word!)’. Given that Pam Brown often quotes from other poets and popular culture, or even odd bits of graffiti or commercial copy, it doesn’t seem wrong to hear an echo of comics like Popeye here. No time at all on Google gave me an example.

That’s just one poem. If I were to find a way that it’s representative of the whole book, I’d say it’s something about interruption. The cover illustration, attributed to Kurt Brereton, is of graffiti that reads ‘wile you are reeding th’. The book is full of interruptions, asides, distractions. ‘The Night’ can be read as being about one more distraction. But such a rich one!

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Eliot Weinberger’s 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

Posted on 31 March 2026 | Leave a comment

Eliot Weinberger, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, (with more ways) (New Directions 2016)

This book must be a classic work on translating poetry. Readers of this blog will know that occasionally I nerd out about translation. Well, Eliot Weinberger does it in spades, only he’s wittier, more erudite and generally much more illuminating.

The book looks at nearly 30 attempts to translate one four-line poem by the classic Chinese poet Wang Wei (c 700–761 CE), mostly into English. The poem is generally but not always, such is the nature of translation, known as ‘The Deer Park’.

Before looking at any of the attempts, there are three short sections presenting and discussing: the original, in Chinese characters, just five on each line; a transliteration into modern pinyin; and a character-by-character translation onto English. To give you some idea of the challenge facing the translator, here is the first line of the character-by-character translation:

Empty_ mountain(s)/hill(s)  (negative)_ to see _ person/people

You can see that the possibilities are vast – and in discussing the different solutions, Weinberger has a lot of fun and at the same time gives an impressionistic account of the influence of Chinese and Japanese poetry on English language poetry in the last 100 years. He doesn’t mind taking on the Chinese language specialists who may know about the language but have no ear for poetry, and he doesn’t hold back with either praise or displeasure.

I’d written to this point when I remembered that I blogged about J. P. Seaton’s Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry almost exactly 16 years ago, and did my own timid, partial, uneducated attempt at comparing versions – of a slightly longer poem by Li Po (701–762). If you’re interested, it’s at this link.

In short, I loved this book, and if you’re interested in Chinese poetry and /or translation in general, you will too. I’m very grateful to John Levy for mentioning it in the comments (at this link).

I’ll give the last word to Weinberger. At the end of the original essay – before Octavio Paz had contributed his learned Afterword, and before Weinberger’s account of a Furious Professor’s response – he writes:

The point is that translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation: translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional life. As no individual reader remains the same, each reading becomes a different – not merely another – reading. The same poem cannot be read twice.

I am an Australian-born man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nationa. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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Jennifer Maiden’s Mandatory Sentence

Posted on 19 March 2026 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maien, Mandatory Sentence (Quemar Press 2026)

Mandatory Sentence is the latest in Jennifer Maiden’s continuing tightrope act of producing a book of poetry at the start of each year. As in previous years, most of its contents are in effect occasional poems, that is, poems written in response to breaking news – developments in the Gaza genocide, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, Anthony Albanese’s visit to China, news about AI, and so on. Many of the poems feature fictional or historical characters responding to these events, sometimes in dialogue with current politicians.

If you’re new to Maiden’s poetry, you might need help with the characters who populate the book. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, familiar from Maiden’s four novels and many poems, appear with their ever-increasing family that includes a son named Corbyn and a number of animals. There’s a weird, cuddly little creature named Brookings – named after the Brookings Institute and originally perhaps emblematic of what Maiden sees as that organisation’s deliberate naivety, but now taking on a life of its own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt and other make brief repeat appearances. Maiden’s daughter Katharine, has appeared in her mother’s poetry since The Winter Baby (1990) – as well as being the book’s publisher in real life.

I read Mandatory Sentence just after my first reading of Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot. They’re very different books, but they both respond with some immediacy to world events from a left / progressive perspective, so it’s not surprising that there are moments when they chime. One such moment is the opening of ‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’, which echoes that of Araluen’s ‘Uplock Actuator System’. For this blog post, I’ll stay there.

Both poems were evidently inspired by the same interview Richard Marles gave on the ABC in August last year – at this link – in which he asserted repeatedly that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel, but is ‘part of the F-35 process’. Neither poem is limited to satirising that assertion – the Shovel does that brilliantly, here. How they each make distinctive poetry from the material is interesting.

‘Uplock Actuator System’ begins:

We aren't sending weapons, they said, 
just the only lock for the only door that 
opens when they are fired from the air.

The poem progresses in nine three-line stanzas of almost intolerable intensity, evoking the suffering of Gaza and linking it to the ‘parallel occupation’ of Australia and the unwilling complicity of all of us. It ends with a call to engagement .

‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’ is by comparison laid-back and playful, adjectives I wouldn’t easily associate with Maiden’s political poems. You can hear her performing it, pretty much deadpan, at this link. Here’s how it appears in Mandatory Sentence:

It begins with the titular Brookings – a ‘small fur baby wombat-possum cross’ who could have come from a children’s cartoon – watching the television, cutely ‘like a kindergarten’. And there’s some almost silly play on words – the word ‘cross’ appears three times, each with a different meaning.

The small fur baby wombat-possum cross 
sits watching Marles on the ABC say we send no arms 
to Israel. Brookings is at present tired and cross 
sitting with his four legs crossed in attention 
like a kindergarten,

The adult shorthand – ‘Marles on the ABC’ – alerts us that this is not a cute and cuddly poem. Contemporary Australian readers will know that this is Richard Marles, Minister for Defence, and the context is Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza (the context has moved on since the book was published – but the poem’s concerns are still sharply relevant). The language of political denial-not-denial is skewered in just three lines.

like a kindergarten, so I probably should not 
have stirred him up by explaining that 
Australia does not send whole weapons but
the doors for bomb bays in their planes
which it replaces as often as they ask.

The poem’s central tension is set up: on one hand, there’s the innocent, naive, playful fantasy creature and on the other the poem’s speaker who is aware that the Australian government is complicit in terrible things.

For the next 14 lines, the rest of the first page, innocent Brookings plays. In the Brookings poems – this book also includes ‘Brookings Becomes a False Flag’ – it’s clear Maiden’s invented character is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet but has an independent imaginary existence. (This may not be obvious with other Maiden characters, but I think it’s always true – Maiden sets her imagined people/creatures up and is interested to see what they have to say – what, for instance, would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say to Kevin Rudd this time? Do I need to say that Bonhoeffer isn’t as cute as Brookings?)

Brookings’s metaphorical origins may be at work in the background, suggesting that liberal organisations like the Brookings Institution aren’t serious about addressing things like genocide. Nerdily, I went to the Institution’s website to see what it was up to at about the time this poem was published – and while it wasn’t playing at being a bomb bay door (or a Bombay door with beads and velvet curtain), it was hosting a discussion about the future of drone warfare (link here). Make of that what you will.

But the poem doesn’t mount an argument about the Brookings Institution. It just gives a picture of innocent, or at least oblivious, playfulness.

There’s a turn, and in the second part of the poem the narrative moves to bedtime, which is a pretext for introducing Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This might seem a bit forced, but if you can accept a ‘fur baby wombat-possum cross’ then why not also accept War and Peace as its ‘best book’?

Embarrassingly, I haven’t read War and Peace (though I saw the King Vidor movie on Super 8 in 1964 and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn). Other readers will know what specific bearing the scene from the novel has on the rest of the poem:

He’ll ask I read him the bit in War and Peace
he likes best at the moment when
Natasha clears belongings from the cart
to make room for some wounded men
as the Rostovs' Moscow house is left
so Kutuzov can defeat Napoleon.

But those of us who haven’t read the novel can still see/feel how it works in the poem.

The War and Peace moment is juxtaposed with the image of Tolstoy at the time when he wrote it:

Tolstoy never fails to soothe
with his independent post-view of
history in its merciful details as
in reality he sits in his wooded plantation
under a tree to school some gathered children.

As often happens with poems, it seems as if this one has gone wandering, from Marles to Brookings, to War and Peace, to Tolstoy sitting with children under a tree. Then the next couple of lines bring it home:

The ABC of Marles does not interplay vision
of children firebombed in tents or shot
in line for food

The poem has interplayed vision of Tolstoy schooling children in a safe ‘independent post-view of / history’ with a scene from his great novel. If tha ABC was to interplay vision of children with the Marles interview, those children would not be safely ‘post-history’ but concurrent with the interview, victims of atrocity. The tension in the opening lines between child-like naivety and a violent reality comes to a head here.

Incidentally, ‘the ABC of Marles’ seems at first to be a slightly odd way of saying ‘Marles on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’, but it can also read, less oddly, as ‘the alphabet of Marles’ – that is, the evasive language Marles uses.

The poem doesn’t go to graphic description of the atrocities – it gives enough to let us know the heaviness that sits in the speaker.

But – and it’s an important question – what is a parent or quasi parent to do? The speaker allows Brookings to continue in ignorance, and the poem ends with the peaceful image of mother and not-quite-child at bedtime;

And now he rests his furry heavy head
in its impossible softness up against my arm
and I read to him again from his best book,
which he opens and shuts a few times first,
transfers to it his bomb bay doorway function

Just two things complicate the image and provoke further thought and feeling.

First, the word ‘impossible’ suggests that, just as any soothing Tolstoy has to offer is dubious because he was writing from a safe historical distance, so any comfort afforded by Brookings is illusory because he is after all an invention, an impossibility.

And second, the last line: what does it mean that the ‘bomb bay doorway function’ can be transferred to a book? What is released when a book ‘opens and shuts’? If you’ve read this far, you probably have as good an answer to that question as I have and together we could probably come up with better ones. I’m reminded of a long history of assertions of the power of the word. There’s the proverbial: ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’, ‘You can kill a person but you can’t kill an idea,’ and so on. The idea seems to be everywhere just now that the narratives we tell are crucial: we can believe the story coming from the White House, or commit ouselves to a different story. That final image gestures towards this kind of thinking. Perhaps what is released in those last lines is the possibility of resistence.

It’s not a call to arms like Evelyn Araluen’s poem, but it is a call to think, to reject double-talk, maybe even to hope.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lating longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* When blogging about a book, I currently focus on page 79, which is my age. Mandatory Sentence has just 70 pages, so I gave myself permission to go with a whim.

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