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Ali Cobby Eckermann, She Is the Earth

Posted on 20 Aug 2024 | 7 comments

Ali Cobby Eckermann, She Is the Earth: a verse novel (Magabala Books 2023)

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara woman. Her mother and grandmother were taken from their families when very young as part of the government policy. She herself was also taken. Raised by a loving German-heritage family, she found her way back to her First Nations family as an adult, after years of searching.

I first met her poetry in Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2009, edited by the late Bob Adamson. In his introduction, Adamson said of her wonderful dramatic monologue ‘Intervention Pay Back’ that it made ‘a new shift in what a poem might say or be’. You can read it in the Cordite Review at this link. Two poems by her, also dramatic monologues, were included in the special Australian issue of the Chicago-based Poetry journal in May 2016. They can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ here and ‘Thunder Raining Poison’ (on the effects of the Maralinga atomic tests on traditional APY lands ) here.

I haven’t read her memoir, Too Afraid to Cry (Ilura Press 2013), or her first verse novel, His Father’s Eyes (OUP 2011). But I can tell you that her second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books 2012), which deals with the aftermath of massacre, is brilliant (my blog post here). Of her verse I have read the chapbook Kami (Vagabond Books 2010) and Inside My Mother (Giramondo 2015, my blog post here), which are both filled with the intensities of re-uniting with her Yankunytjatjara kin and culture, and the loss of her birth mother soon after finding her.

All of this work has enormous power, and has garnered many awards in Australia and elsewhere.

She Is the Earth, which arrived eight years after her previous book, is a different kind of writing.

It’s described on the title page as a verse novel. There are no characters apart from an unnamed narrator, and no clear events apart from her meandering through an Australian landscape. Any movement is internal. But the book is meant to be read as a single text rather than a collection of short, untitled poems.

At first, I thought it was an imagined story of pre-birth existence, in which the narrator moves towards being born, taking on substance in the world. But that didn’t seem to work and in the end, I gave up on trying to find a narrative, and just went with the flow.

The flow is far from terrible, and the language is never less than gripping, but I don’t know what to say about the book as a whole. I can refer you to better minds than mine.

Here is part of what the judges had to say when the book won the Indigenous Writers’ Prize at the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (go to this link for their full comments):

Ali Cobby Eckermann writes in a poetics of self-emergence in which the spectral is made solid through an eloquent economy of language and lifeforms. Each word of this verse novel is deeply considered and rich with meaning, forming as a whole a narrative which is sometimes gentle and sometimes sharp, both beautiful and terrible, and always profound in its exploration of healing, hope and the earth. Each word reads as a gift to the reader.

I recommend Aidan Coleman’s review in The Conversation (at this link). He discusses the book as an example of minimalism, and says interesting things about its recurring images, and even about the developing narrative:

The speaker in these poems is both child and mother, pupil and teacher. References to children and motherhood abound. Initial images of disconnection, anxiety and trauma give way, in later sections, to wholeness and calm.

But the journey is not linear: hope is present from the earliest sections and trauma haunts the closing pages. Healing is presented as an ongoing process that is projected beyond the poem.

[Added later in response to Kim’s comment: Kim on reading Matters had a very different, and more attuned response than mine. You can read her blog post at this link.

Page 77* occurs toward the end – there are 90 pages in the book. Piggybacking on Aidan Coleman’s reading, I can see it as a moment of consolidation, of identity firming up in the landscape:

The pleasure of these lines doesn’t depend on their function in the broader narrative. The owl arrives; the narrator admires it; their eyes meet, and there is a moment of identification with the bird; the ‘masterpiece of art’ of the bird’s plumage somehow transfers so that the narrator is painted. The final couplet pulls all that together.

In the wider scheme, that last couplet resolves more than the preceding eight lines. Up to now, the narrator has been full of yearning and unease. Here she seems to find peace: 

this is my totem 
this is my song

‘Totem’ takes the hint of identification in the comparison of eyes a step further. There’s something about finding a place of belonging, of deep affinity, of being at home in the world. Once that’s found, there’s the possibility of singing, of having one’s own song.

The first word on the next page is ‘resurrected’, and a couple of pages further on my favourite lines in the book:

I am a solo candle
inside a chandelier

this is the wisdom
I need to succeed.

I still can’t say I understand what’s going on at any given moment in this book. But maybe that’s OK.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, where it is my great joy to live. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Sou Vai Keng’s art of ignorance

Posted on 18 Aug 2024 | Leave a comment

Sou Vai Keng, art of ignorance(Flying Island Books 2023)

art of ignorance is the last of the small but substantial books I took with me on my recent fortnight in North Queensland. Like the others, it’s part of the Flying Island Pocket Poets series.

It’s a bilingual book – that is, each poem appears first in English then in Chinese. As there is no mention of a translator, I assume Sou Vai Keng wrote both versions. She also created the generous number of elegant drawings that intensify the book’s relaxed, contemplative feel.

A note tells us that all the poems were written in mountain areas in Germany and Switzerland between 2014 and 2018. Reading the book felt like sharing the experience of immersion in those mountains with someone with sharp eyes and a seriously playful mind – there’s not a lot of explicit description, things are seen in close-up, sometimes with a touch of surrealism, there are tiny fables and fantasies.

The opening line of the title poem could stand as an eight-word statement of the book’s prevailing mood:

the butterfly does not know the French call it papillon

Page 77* is a good example of how the book works: English on the left, Chinese on the right, with a delicate drawing in the middle (I’m sorry my tech skills aren’t up to showing the drawing without it being sliced in half by the gutter):

The poem starts with sweet whimsy: 

she believes she is a tree

The rest of the first stanza elaborates: to be a tree is to ‘live on blessings from heaven’ in the form of rain and dew, and not to need anything else. A different poem might have mentioned roots and connection with other trees by way of the complex underground tangle of fungi. It might have mentioned birds’ nests, or arboreal animals, or fruits and flowers. But not this one. Here the character, like certain ascetics in the early Christian tradition, and in Chinese tradition as well I think, is opting out of active social life, choosing solitude and passivity in relation to a world she assumes to be benign.

But society intervenes. If she was ‘mean and nasty’, she could vanish, but her version of opting out is ‘a lovely idea’. It’s an idea that, by implication, the passers-by find attractive but not permitted. It’s ‘lunacy’. The poem is a parable of sorts, in which a character indulges for a moment a yearning to be stable and self-sufficient like a tree, only to be drawn back gently to the reality of human connectedness and instability:

out of sympathy and solidarity 
people drag her away from where 
trees stand firm and strong
and from now on she has to 
roam and rove around 
together with other 
rootless nuts

The final word, far from offering a neat resolution of the poem’s conflict, raises more questions. What does it mean to equate humans with nuts? Nuts as opposed to sane, stable beings; nuts as fruits, insubstantial compared to the tree; nuts as bearing the possibility if one day taking root and developing into something more like trees? She is dragged away from her wistful belief, but at the very last moment the poem opens up to the possibility of her fantasy somehow becoming real.

It’s a fine example of the way Sou Vai Veng’s poem’s twist and turn beneath apparent simplicity. I enjoyed the book a lot.

I wrote this blog post in Gadigal Wangal country, as the days are warming up, the worms are fat and busy in the earth, the adolescent magpies are developing their adult colours. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Anastasia Radievska’s City of the Sun

Posted on 6 Aug 2024 | Leave a comment

Anastasia Radievska, City of the Sun / Місто Сонця (Flying Island Books 2024)

This is Ukrainian-Australian poet and artist Anastasia Radievska’s first book of poems. It’s a rich, complex creation.

There are poems in English and Ukrainian, which means that almost half the book’s contents remain enigmatic and even unpronounceable to readers like me who can’t read Ukrainian script – but beautiful to look at.

The book takes its title from The City of the Sun, an early 17th century philosophical work by Tommaso Campanella, which according to Wikipedia is an important early Utopian work. Campanella’s city is protected by a series of walls, and this book’s sections are named for six of those walls. Each section is introduced with what I assume to be a quote from Campanella describing the images painted on its wall – followed by a double-spread illustration, a semi-abstract painting that mostly relates to that description.

For example, ‘The Fifth Wall’ is introduced by this paragraph:

On the fifth interior they have all the larger animals of the earth, as many in number as would astonish you. We indeed know not the thousandth part of them, for on the exterior wall also a great many of immense size are also portrayed.

For a casual reader like me, this framing has a pleasingly decorative effect, but as with the beautiful characters of the Ukrainian alphabet I expect that a more serious approach would make the reading experience much richer. More serious readers, please speak to us in the comments.

Page 77* includes neither Ukrainian text, quotation from Campanella, nor illustration. It’s ‘instructions for lunchtime’, one of six English poems in the ‘The Fifth Wall’ (which also includes six Ukrainian poems). As you would expect from the section’s introduction above, the poem features some of ‘the larger animals of the earth’.

instructions for lunchtime

always remember
dogs are beautiful for having been engineered 
and well-loved
to engineer us back

the gaze turned inward 
towards something worthy –
finally – of looking back at

and an entire piece of ginger in the mouth
doesn't say otherwise

but thinks of course 
of racing horses
with ginger in the sacrum 
a culinary cruelty 
somebody's paying to have 
done to them

and on a Monday
I would too if hadn't thrown away 
a fortune on tom kha soup 
in little brown bowls 
and a seat by the window

watching the dog wag its tail at the Lime bike 
like it might be relevant to it 
as a conspirator or fellow thing 
to answer our doubts with – 
throw in the river
– price – chase 
at fleece rabbits –
does it not breed, breed, breed?

As with Radievska’s poems generally, part of the pleasure here lies in the poem’s difficulty. It’s not that there’s a puzzle to be deciphered; what the poem asks for is a little patience – understanding will come.

The poem starts with an abstract consideration about dogs, goes to the sensation of ginger in the mouth, then to a memory of cruelty to horses. Only at about the fifteenth line, you get to see some coherence. As advised in the title, it’s a lunch poem: the speaker is having her customary tom kha soup in a Thai eatery. Just as she sees a dog in the street outside the window wagging its tail at a hire bike, she finds she has put a whole piece of ginger into her mouth and her mind wanders to something she has heard about a use of ginger in horse-racing. Her attention returns from the ginger and horses to what she is seeing in the street, and she indulges some fanciful imaginings about the dog and the bike.

That’s the narrative.

There’s a lot else happening. The opening injunction, ‘Always remember…’, is a nice reminder of something we all know: we find dogs beautiful because we have bred (‘engineered’) them to be that way, but they have their own subjectivity and have changed us in turn. It’s not the standard joke about how dogs have made us their servants – bringing them food, throwing balls for them, cleaning up their messes, etc. It something about the dogs’ gaze: meeting a dog’s eyes can make you feel (‘finally’) that you are worth looking at (unlike the often indifferent or critical gaze of other human beings).

The piece of ginger in the mouth introduces a different human–animal relationship – a piece of ‘culinary cruelty’ in the racing industry. I don’t know what ‘ginger in the sacrum’ is and couldn’t find anything in a quick online search, but I’ll trust the poem that it’s a thing.

someone is paying 
to have done to them

The cruelty to horses is a comparatively malevolent, profit-driven parallel to the engineering of dogs.

But this isn’t a poem of indignation or protest:

and on a Monday
I would too

At first glance this seems to be condoning cruelty to racehorses, but it’s worth spending time on the convoluted syntax to realise that it’s actually a little joke, playing perhaps on the ambiguity of ‘them’ in the previous line – callous about the horses, perhaps, but only because not keeping them in mind. A paraphrase might be: ‘When I have to drag myself to work on a Monday, I’d happily pay someone to do something similar to me …’

I would too if hadn’t thrown away
a fortune on tom kha soup

And with this mock-lament at having spent money on soup rather than self-torture, we’re back by the restaurant window, or in the reader’s case, realising for the first time that that’s where we are, watching with idle amusement as a dog confronts a hire bike (Lime bikes are everywhere in my part of town).

The thoughts projected onto the dog pick up on the poem’s opening lines: dogs are bred to please us but they look back and have an effect on us. Can a bike do the same? The answer isn’t as obvious as we’d like. Sure, a bike can be thrown in the river, the cash transaction is front and centre, and (we know, even if the dog doesn’t) that a bike won’t play with a soft toy. But the final line introduces some doubt:

does it not breed, breed, breed?

On the surface, this is a version of the joke about the discarded hire bikes that litter some parts of our cities – they’re breeding like rabbits. The dog asks if that’s literally so. But there are further possibilities: there may be something about capitalism as a creature that has got out of hand, but what strikes me is a suggestion that as artificial intelligence develops, perhaps objects like this bike will, like dogs, develop agency of their own, and if they haven’t already changed the way we see ourselves (with ‘the gaze turned inward’), that may be just a few generations of breeding/engineering away. Dogs and horses are among the ‘larger animals’; the poem asks if bicycles also belong in that category, or will some day.

Not bad for a poem that presents as capturing the idle play of mind during a lunch break.

I finished writing this blog post on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are growing longer, and some wattle trees are in exuberant flower. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice, especially with books of poetry, is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Mark Mahemoff’s Beautiful Flames

Posted on 2 Aug 2024 | 2 comments

Mark Mahemoff, Beautiful Flames (Flying Island Books 2024)

This is another pocket-sized book I took with me on my recent trip to North Queensland. It’s Mark Mahemoff’s sixth book, a modest, user-friendly poetry collection in four sections.

The first section, ‘Chronicles’, mostly includes brief stories taken from life – family events, losses, a school reunion, the process of leaving home. From ‘Leaving’ (page 20):

Because childhood is a country
no one escapes unscathed
we haul it like a suitcase
stuffed full of unwashed clothes.

The second section, ‘Observations’ is what it says on the lid, observations on life’s passing parade. The titles of its poems generally tell you what to expect: ‘Kookaburras’, ‘Night Train’, ‘A Mediation’, ‘Bar Sport’, ‘Professional Development’.

The main pleasure of these first two sections is like what can get from a photograph of something ordinary – not claiming that it’s anything other than ordinary, but inviting us to pay attention to it for a moment. I generally try not to quote the final lines of poems – it’s too much like revealing the punchline of a joke – but the last stanza of ‘Nasturtiums’ (page 53) is too good an example of what I mean. Having described the large patch of these flowers on a lawn ‘somewhere in Haberfield’, and wondered whether they count as ‘weeds, food or flours’, the poem concludes:

But just devour them with your eyes
and you'll find that's enough
when you're walking beside someone
or alone
in sunlight.

That might seem banal but there’s some subtle, even self-effacing complexity. Mahemoff isn’t just talking about his own walk, but gently and elliptically inviting us to go on a walk of our own, to see for ourselves, and the last two line breaks create an unsettling effect. (What if it’s an overcast day, will it be enough then? If not, is it because the flowers look drab without the sun on them? Or is the sunlight a kind of companion?) The poem isn’t tied off in a neat bow.

The third section, ‘Travelogue’, comprises six poems in the form of notes from visits to, respectively, Western Australia, New Zealand, Melbourne, two unnamed places (one of which has a river and the other cactus plants), and Texas. The last-mentioned (‘Dallas in January’, page 84) forms a nice companion piece to Andrew O’Hagan’s essay ‘The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald’ in The Atlantic Ocean, which I read a couple of weeks ago: O’Hagan and Mahemoff describe the same museum, and have similar responses.

Page 77* contains two of the nine short poems that make up ‘New Zealand Snaps’.

The first is ‘Lower Shotover’:

Lower Shotover
Cool in the shade.
Singeing in the sun.
'The ozone layer is thinner here,'
she said.
You watch washing flap 
while jets cruise past mountains.
How does one manage 
this surfeit of beauty?
A bee falters 
from flower to flower.

I had to look Lower Shotover up, but even without seeing images online (here are some if you’re interested), I knew from the poem the kind of place it is. And that’s without any of the kind of writing you might find in a tourist brochure or a poem that trusted its readers less.

It’s a thing in some contemporary poetry to plonk one thing down after another – an image, a quote, an aphorism – and call on readers to make their own connections. The poem becomes a collaboration between writer and reader. ‘Lower Shotover’ does a version of that, giving us a two-line observation about the temperature, a snippet of dialogue, images of washing on a line and jets in the sky, an abstract question, an image of a bee. We’re not left entirely to our own devices. We know from the title that the disparate items all refer to a place, but it’s up to us, for example, to imagine who speaks the third line (I think it’s the host at a tourism spot, but you might think it’s a visiting climate scientist), or whose washing flaps in the fifth line. But what is definitely there is the way the poem moves from bodily sensations in the first lines, to human connection in the third and fourth, to attention first to things seen and heard in close-up and then things seen and heard heard far-off . Only then, in the seventh and eight lines, is there an oblique reference to the reason the poem exists: the beauty of the place. But instead of trying to describe the beauty, the poem in effect confesses itself inadequate to the task. The image of the bee in the last two lines brings a nice meta touch – the poem itself has been faltering from one thing to another.

The second poem, unlike most of the poems in this book has a strict form. Each of its stanzas consists of 17 syllables – 5 in the first and third lines and 7 in the middle line. Yes, they are haiku, as we have come to understand that form in the English-speaking world. 

Fox Glacier
Mountains demand awe.
We whisper in their presence, 
take snapshots, and leave.

It rains ceaselessly.
A single set of headlights
burns through the distance.

Haiku, like sonnets, have a turn. In these examples, the turn has a visual quality: in the first, our gaze rotates (literally turns!) from the mountains to the tourists; in the second, there’s a change of focus from wide to narrow. I’m not sure that the rules of haiku, strictly speaking, allow words like ‘I’ and ‘we’, but the point of this ‘we’ here is that the human presence is tiny, and temporary, barely there at all.

Having written that, I have just read in Mark Mahemoff’s bio at the back of the book that his poetry

is chiefly concerned with framing, reimagining and memorialising commonplace moments, primarily in an urban setting.

Which makes me notice one more thing about these haiku: the Fox Glacier is about as far from an ‘urban setting’ as you can get, yet both haiku have industrial elements – snapshots and headlights – that make their (momentarily puny) demands on our attention.

I finished writing this blog post on Gadigal Wangal country, where I’ve noticed leaf-curling spiders waiting patiently in their rain-spangled webs. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 77.

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Carl Walsh’s Tarp Green Light, page 77

Posted on 20 Jul 2024 | 1 comment

Carl Walsh, Tarp Green Light (Flying Island Books 2023)

Of recent years the emerging Artist and I have travelled north for a couple of weeks each winter. In last year’s fortnight on Yunbenun (Magnetic Island) I read and subsequently blogged about nine books, eight of which were in Flying Island’s Pocket Poets series.

This year we have come further north, and I’ve read a lot less. Tarp Green Light is the first of four Pocket Poets I’ve read.

The Note on the Author tells us:

Originally a tradie, Carl snuck into uni in his mid-twenties, after two years volunteering in PNG. He’s almost always written poetry – some poems in this book had their genesis in notebooks while backpacking in 1997.

Those backpacking notebooks have borne wonderful fruit. There are fine poems on other subjects – Linnaean categories, the Old Norse alphabet (I think), childhood memories, family history, and more. But it’s the poems that evoke particular places that create the strongest impression. The places include Papua New Guinea, Ireland, rural Australia, a number of European countries, and Japan.

The book’s title comes from one of the PNG poems, ‘Sepik Wara’. The poem is hard to quote from, as it’s laid out with text on either side of a broad winding river of white space, but here’s an attempt:

_________________________ _____________ we eye
rush of black clouds____________  __ _ pooling
in the sky; unfold ______________plastic tarps
to array over_______________________ our heads
as rain sheets________________ down we breathe
the close_______________ air and laugh at each
other__________________ in the tarp green light

At least one poem, ‘Idiot Fruit’, visits the Daintree, where I have recently spent a day:

Is it cassowary plums that lay 
as blue/grey eggs on the ground?

My blogging practice is to focus on page 77 (at least until I turn 78). In books like this, the practice saves me the impossible task of choosing one poem to represent them all. ‘Niseko miso’, on this book’s page 77, is one of the very few prose poems in the book, but in other ways is a fine example of how Carl Walsh can evoke a place::

Niseko miso
The cloudiness of my miso is reflected in
afternoon sky with dark seaweed stretches of 
kombu cloud and strips of white tofu. But this sky 
is perforated with peaks. Active in their inactivity
– three thousand years just a nap. How old I 
am in their years? My head hurts at the maths.
Perhaps I should get Isabelle to calculate it? Some 
are wild for ten thousand years. Even resting, 
prone to throwing unexpected parties. I glance 
at Mt Yōtei, its dark bulk everywhere. Hope it's 
content with its sleeping. That Kagu-tsuchi-no-
kami, the fire-spirit, is happy. I stir my miso – and 
the clouds burst with rain.

Like many travel poems, this becomes more enjoyable when you know something about the places it names. A quick bit of browsing told me that Niseko is a ski resort area in Hokkaido; kombu is the kind of seaweed you might find floating in a bowl of miso soup; Mt Yōtei is a volcano, one of the hundred famous mountains of Japan, and popular for backcountry skiing expeditions; and Kagu-tsuchi-no-kami is, as the poem implies, a fire spirit whose rages are to be feared. Mt Yōtei last erupted about 3000 years ago but it is still active.

The poem deftly conjures up a situation: the speaker is drinking miso soup one afternoon in the foothills of Mt Yōtei, probably at a resort of some kind (his mind goes to wild parties as a synonym for volcanic eruption). He may be alone while drinking soup and composing the poem, but he has a female companion, Isabelle, who is probably travelling with him, certainly within easy communication distance.

The speaker idly/playfully notices a similarity between the appearance of the sky and that of his soup: clouds and seaweed allow sky and soup to be synonyms for each other.

Then there’s a but, a word I’m coming to love in poetry as signifying a turn of some kind. Here the speaker notices the major flaw in his synonym: the soup has no equivalent to the mountain peaks that pierce the clouds. The mountains dominate the rest of the poem, prompting thoughts about geological time. The tone is still playful – volcanic activity is described as wild partying, prolonged or brief and unexpected – but there are quiet hints of awe in the presence of the sublime.

In the two sentences before the last one, another dimension of the place of the poem comes into play. These mountains have had stories told about them for millennia. The speaker acknowledges this, by naming the fire spirit Kagu-tsuchi-no-kami, at the same time expressing anxiety about a potential eruption. (Maybe it’s just me but that seems to be a very Australian response, given how very extinct our volcanoes seem to be.)

Then in the last sentence, the poem comes down to earth, and attention returns to the soup and the clouds. There’s a hint of sympathetic magic – did stirring the soup make the rain come? – but the main effect is to pull back from vast, fearsome, mythological thoughts to the present moment, the place where the poem started.

I read this book near the mountains of Yidinji land and finished writing the blog post on Gadigal–Wangal land, where the sky is brilliant blue and the wind is chill. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of both peoples.

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Ivy Ireland’s Tide

Posted on 7 May 2024 | Leave a comment

Ivy Ireland, Tide (Flying Island Books 2024)

Tide may seem like a quietly generic title for a book, especially one that has a number of poems about the sea, but a laconic note on sources suggests a dark subtext:

The title of this book, Tide, and the title of the poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, are both taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832) with the necessary reverence.

I decided to read the Tennyson poem. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t read it before, but many of its lines (‘the mirror cracked from side to side’, ‘The curse is come upon me’) were familiar, probably from young Dorothy Hewett’s romanticism as recorded in her autobiography, Wild Card. Certainly Ivy Ireland’s compressed, science-related poems, with close observations of the real world, are not at all like Tennyson’s flowery, relentlessly rhyming lines. The word ‘tide’ occurs only once:

For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
       The Lady of Shalott.

The note on sources, then, leads one to expect something death-related: the tide is metaphorical, bearing us inexorably away. The book only partly meets that expectation. There’s a lot of life here, and not much death.

The book is divided into four sections of unequal length named for tidal phases: ‘Ebb’, ‘Low’, ‘Flood’, and ‘High’. If I had to pick favourites, I’d say I enjoyed the poems in ‘Low’ most: in ‘Lake Poet’, in the context of the climate emergency (not explicitly named, but definitely there in my mind) the lake is less a thing of sublime beauty than a place that will hold the poet to account, as opposed to the city, where ‘nobody has to answer for anything; in ‘Cane Toad’, the poet and her young daughter encounter some teenagers on Valentine’s Day:

She asks me,
of all people,
if they are going to marry,
those beatified ones,
out decking each other in posies
in the quiet toilet paper aisle.

‘Killing Plovers’ is a yarn about family life that takes on a fable-like quality about humans’ relations to other animals; ‘The Birth of the Universe’ is a wonderful poem about a) the Big Bang and b) giving birth.

The section ‘Flood’ comprises six prose poems, including ‘I Am John Is Dead’, long enough to be called a short story, about a young woman’s encounter with a New Age guru in the outback, which accurately describes itself as ‘like a Jim Jarmusch film’.

Page 47* is the title page for the book’s final section, ‘High’. The section includes just one poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, in which the narrator with one other person goes sailing off the Queensland coast. Since the note on sources mentions this poem, I looked at the Tennyson poem again, and found:

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
       Over tower'd Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
       The Lady of Shalott.

This is the boat on which the Lady of Shalott floated to her doom.

Happily, the speaker of Ivy Ireland’s sailing excursion survives, having had a very nice time, even if it is sometimes scary and perhaps humiliating as she feels her incompetence.

Here’s the first of the poem’s 12 parts, from page 48:

A Shallow Boat

1.

Out on the water, 
wind shocks with volume.
Waves whip-crack me to sleep, 
hustle me awake at all hours.
The boat screams in joyous bells 
beyond twelve knots.
I lack words to remark on 
the changeability of air and temper, 
the tang on my tongue
as words are taken from my mouth 
as sharp as the smack of cormorants 
hitting water 
in free-fall.

All I really want to say about this is that I love it. I have no desire to go sailing. I breathe a guilty sigh of relief when I realise that the Emerging Artist gets seasick very easily, so is unlikely to be urging me to do it. But I love it as evoked in this poem.

The poem is almost a sonnet. The first six lines describe the wind, the waves, the sounds of the boat. Then there’s a turn, and in the next five lines the poet tries and fails to articulate a response. Then there’s a three-line equivalent to a sonnet’s final couplet – rather than a witty encapsulation of what has gone before, here it’s the cormorants, ostensibly a metaphor for the poet’s speechlessness but actually just there, smacking the water.

Every verb, every adjective, every noun is carrying its share of the meaning-load, and the sound design is wonderful. The echoing Ws bind the lines together, with a little respite for Ts (‘temper’, ‘tang’, ‘tongue’, ‘taken’, and then ‘cormorants’) in lines 8 to 11. Back to W and then the Fs in the last line introduce a new, final sound.

The Tennysonian hints of doom may be realised in later parts of the poem, as in these chillingly succinct lines from part viii:

There's a point 
where climate emergency, 
once witnessed, 
ticks over from 
possible to inevitable;
anything else is inconceivable.

But that’s context rather than substance. The joy in this poem, as in the whole book, is in celebrating engagement with the natural world, vulnerable, dangerous, fragile, awesome, beautiful, breathtaking (sometimes literally). From section ix:

Orange shifts over the horizon, and here we are: 
alive, while countless others are not.
Who am I to deserve daybreak. This happening here, 
sea eagle fishing beside the boat,
sea turtle snorting to the surface. What's it for, 
to be so honoured.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I’m posting it on a day that has shifted from bright blue sky to heavy downpour within hours. From my window I can see wet gum leaves reflecting the afternoon sunlight as they have been witnessed by First nations peoples here for tens of thousands of years.

* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. A focus on just one page seems to me to be almost necessary with books of poetry, where the parts are so often greater than the whole. As Tide has fewer than 77 pages, so I’m focusing instead on my birth year, ’47.

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Chris Mansell’s Foxline

Posted on 22 Apr 2024 | Leave a comment

Chris Mansell, Foxline (Flying Island 2021)

Chris Mansell is an Australian poet with an impressive list of books and awards to her name. She has also played a significant role in fostering and publishing other poets. Here’s a link to her website. Foxline is part of Flying Island’s Pocket Poets Series, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, but offering a substantial reading experience.

The book’s last page has a note describing its genesis:

I came across a fenceline of foxes scalped and strung by their hind legs on the boundary fence of a farm. There were about two hundred dead and even dead they were beautiful. … I imagined the farmer, perhaps less articulate than the fox. I imagined him walking the paddocks in stolid opposition to the creatures that were taking his sheep.
It is real and it is also traditional. It is in his blood as it is in the blood of the fox to hunt and feed their young.

Each of the book’s 30 poems is spoken by the farmer or a fox. In most of the fox poems the speaker is a female fox; occasionally we hear from a young male, and even once or twice a flying fox. Both Fox and Man (they are capitalised in the marginal notes) are interested in more than each other, but mainly the poems deal with their relationship: their antagonism, their attempts to understand each other, and their recognition of what they have in common. They even manage to learn from each other.

In one poem (‘Dark Solo’) a young male fox becomes the fox in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-Fox’. But the literary work I was most strongly reminded of is Roald Dahl’s The Marvellous Mister Fox. In some ways Mansell’s book could be read as an adult response to Dahl’s. Here there is no easy resolution to the conflict between Man and Fox and, contrary to what you might expect from Mansell’s account of the book’s origins, both characters elicit our sympathy.

Before I talk about page 77*, I want to name my favourite stanza in the book. It’s the beginning of ‘Surprise’, one of the Man’s poems, and is a haiku-like stanza (or more accurately senryu-like, as haiku aren’t supposed to mention people):

we are always surprised
here every winter
we are amazed it's cold

The poem goes on to arrive, elegantly, at how we are ‘astounded / by death especially’. I love the way the poem makes poetry from an often-heard New-South-Wales joke, then takes it somewhere unexpected but completely right.

Page 77 is the beginning of the poem, ‘He relates their conversation’.

HE RELATES THEIR CONVERSATION

Like every poem in the book, this one has a note in the margin telling us who is speaking and offering a brief summary, the way some 18th century novels do, as if acknowledging that the semi-articulate protagonists don’t always make themselves clear:

The Man 
recounts the 
Fox's wisdom

The italics on this page signify that though the Man is speaking, he is relating the Fox’s words. The Fox’s ‘wisdom’ is paradoxical:

fox says sometimes of our friendship
I think it is failure that keeps
us together

In what way are they together? And whose failure does she mean? An obvious meaning is that ‘together’ really means ‘both alive in the same locality’, and the failure is that of the Man – he has failed in his quest to kill the fox. But the word ‘friendship’ in the first line suggests that something else is going on. Its cryptic possibilities provide the impetus to read on.

that I should fail in certain ways 
be unkept and poor to be less 
approved of in the field

Before she gets to ‘friendship’, the Fox expands on what she means by ‘failure’. She is the one who must fail. To understand ‘in certain ways’ we don’t need to think beyond the Fox’s activity as sheep-killer. If she succeeds in killing or even damaging the Man’s livestock that’s the end of any fellow-feeling. ‘Unkept’ is an example of the way the Fox’s language is interestingly off-kilter throughout the book. It’s not quite ‘unkempt’ though it possibly includes that. It suggests the opposite of ‘well-kept’ as in well-fed. The fox needs to be bad at her job – ‘less / approved of’ in the field’ by other foxes, perhaps.

you have the rifle 
your freedoms and fiefdoms are
what you choose_ your limits

and your boundaries are bought 
owned certified and succinct

(The double space in the third line here acts as a break in the meaning – a full stop.) But yes, the Man must also fail in his quest to eliminate the fox. He has the means, but he can choose to act freely or according to an imposed order. ‘Freedoms and fiefdoms’ is a wonderfully evocative phrase: is this farmer a free operative or is he pretty much a serf in the current economic order? It’s his choice. the limits and boundaries are those of the farm, but they are also limitations and constrictions on himself that he has bought into.

I wear the orange and you the black

On first reading, I had no idea what this meant. Now that I’ve pondered the previous lines, its meaning leaps out at me. The Fox is making an analogy to sporting teams – Australian cricketers wear the baggy greens, Indians the bleed blues. The Fox and the Man belong on different teams.

I won’t go on in detail about the remaining page and a bit. In short, the man now speaks in his own voice, expressing a wish to become the Fox, and they recognise the similarity between the rifle and the fox’s ‘whitesharp teeth’. According to an explanatory side note:

They know 
they have a 
tense 
commonality

‘Tense commonality’ is an excellent human-prose translation of the Fox’s term ‘friendship’.

* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

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Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry

Posted on 16 Apr 2024 | 2 comments

Robbie Coburn, Ghost Poetry (Upswell Press 2024)

Ghost Poetry‘s back cover blurb includes a discreet trigger warning:

Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.

I agree that these poems are beautifully crafted and confronting, but I wouldn’t say I was actually scarred by them. They do deal with tough subjects – self harm, addiction, the mental health system, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, abortion, rape and more. But there are also horses, a love-poetry thread, and always the sense that the poetry is doing much more than giving vent to pain and suffering, and not at all playing for shocks.

Some of the poems are presented as accounts of dreams, of nightmares really, and many others have a dreamlike quality. Perhaps more accurately, in many of the poems the border between waking and dreaming is blurred so that the emotional intensity and weird logic of nightmare suffuses the daylight world. Sometimes the speaker seems to be a ghost.

A partial list of the titles in ‘Blood Ritual’, the first of the book’s three sections, gives an idea of what I mean: ‘Dream of Human Sacrifice’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Dream of Scarification’, ‘Cutter’, ‘Dream of Suicide’, ‘Bloodletting’, ‘Dream of Abortion’, ‘I Dreamed I Saw You on a Bridge’, ‘Asylum’. I’m not being entirely flippant when I say it was a relief to read the opening lines of ‘Poetry’, the final poem in the section:

I am tired of these poems;

you can only write your own death
so many times before
you begin to plan for its arrival.

The second section, ‘Wreck’, is filled with horses, and love poems. Again, there is a lot of pain, but also moments of delight as in ‘Foals’, where the poem’s speaker addresses a loved one. You don’t need to have been around newborn foals or calves to be moved by the poem’s final lines, though you may need to have been in love:

as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass

like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk.

If I had to name a single subject (always a bit of a mug’s game) of the third section, ‘Straw Horses’, I’d say it was love for someone in pain:

I want to touch your tortured bones 
as if my hands were gauze.

But my practice of looking at page 77 demonstrates that it’s not just the loved one who is in pain. ‘Love Poem to a Razorblade’ is not the only one that deals with flesh being cut, in other poems mostly by knives, in dreams, and the flesh not necessarily that of the speaker. Here the subject is definitely self-harm:

It’s a hard poem to write about. As I was drafting this blog post, an article by Rose Cartwright in the Guardian Online threw me a lifeline. It included this:

‘What happened here?’ a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
‘I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – ‘I was mentally ill’ – no longer felt right.

I was the poster girl for OCD, Guardian 13 April 2024

This poem sets out to bridge that awkward silence. You will read it differently depending on the experience you bring to it. For myself, I’ve never had a compulsion to self-harm, at least not of the cutting kind, and my relevant experience is limited to conversations with parents of young ‘cutters’. One of the main things I’ve gleaned is that communication is problematic: the young person can’t talk about what’s happening and/or the person wanting to help can’t bear to hear what they’re trying to say. That difficulty is at the heart of this poem.

I don’t know if Robbie Coburn is writing from his own lived experience, or as an extraordinary act of empathetic imagination. Either way, the poem calls on the reader to attend to a voice that is rarely heard.

Love Poem to a Razorblade

Anyone who has ever been addicted to anything harmful – cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, chocolate – recognises the paradox. If, as a person with high blood pressure, I were to write ‘Love Poem to a Fried Dim Sim’, the tone would be different: despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a fried dim sim habit is only mildly stigmatised, certainly not seen as ‘mental illness’. But the paradox is similar. The behaviour is doing me no good, but I am drawn to it. It’s not too much of a stretch to call that love.

The first lines are full of possibilities:

As a child I knew
I could keep you hidden.

I turned away from the past 
and saw your mouth open 
and cover me.

First there’s secretiveness. This isn’t about guilt. It’s not ‘should’, but ‘could’ – there’s a kind of power there. But the question hovers: ‘Hidden from whom?’ From someone who would punish or shame the young one, probably. The next line provokes an allied question, ‘What happened in the past that I had to turn away from it?’ As I read it, the speaker had an (unspecified) unbearable experience as a child and, unable to turn to a human for comfort, somehow turned to the razor blade, to self harm.

I struggle to visualise a contemporary razor blade with an open mouth, but those from my childhood, and I’m guessing from the much younger Robbie Coburn’s, could be flexed so that the opening along the middle would open out. All the same, it’s impossible to visualise this ‘mouth’ covering someone. The lines are after an emotional truth rather than a visual image – the possibilities of the blade enclosed the young person in a protective cover against whatever he was turning away from.

you told me love wasn't a word 
to be spoken
but a scar cut into the surface 
of the body.

anybody you love in this world
will mark you.

A human comforter would have said something (‘It’s all right, ‘You’re OK,’ ‘This will pass’ …). The razor blade’s ‘mouth’ had no words, its message is conveyed, recorded, imprinted, by action.

But there’s more to these lines than that. They don’t dwell on the act of cutting – the welling blood, the pain, etc – which happens in the moment, like a word. The message is in the aftermath, the enduring scar, in the surface of the body but also in the mind, an expectation that love will involve damage. But not necessarily damage! In another context that last couplet could have a completely benign meaning: isn’t it true, and interesting, that if you love somebody they have an effect on you, leave a mark on you? Here, though, ‘mark’ carries a strong negative meaning.

I believed you;
each promise immovable, 
every moment between us 
carved into permanence.

The message from the razor blade is that those effects and marks are solid, scarlike, immovable, permanent. If there’s grief or humiliation in a relationship, you will remain grief-stricken or humiliated forever. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. It’s not just self-harm that lodges such messages in the mind, of course. Don’t we all have moments in our childhood that have created templates for how we expect the world to always be?

even when you were taken 
you have never left me –

It’s childhood experience that has been described so far. ‘When you were taken’ implies an intervention that stopped the self-harm, possibly at an early age. But the effect of those moments persists. 

the blood was ours, 
every night we were alone, 
silently holding you in secret.

In this last triplet, having reflected on the long term effects of cutting, the speaker can at last look at the moment itself. Only now, can he name the blood, and evoke the (creepy) romance of the moment. I think of the song from Calamity Jane, ‘Once I had a secret love‘, and though I can’t articulate it I know that I’ve been taken somewhere.

While writing this, I have had to walk away from the computer every now and then and breathe for a while. You can feel the poet’s steely will as he holds his mind to this subject, honouring its complexity.

It’s a gruelling book, but rewarding.

I am grateful to Robbie Coburn for my copy of Ghost Poetry.

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Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister, page 77

Posted on 9 Apr 2024 | 3 comments

Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister (jukurrpa books, 2004)

Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Yagera of Minjerribah (aka Stradbroke Island) and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. She is a poet, spoken word performer, philosopher and filmmaker. A brief showreel from the transmedia work One Billion Beats (2016), which she co-wrote and co-directed with Alanna Valentine, gives a powerful glimpse of her stage and screen presence, as well as her incisive writing (link here). Also on Vimeo is a profound lecture she gave about that work (link here), which discusses the colonial gaze and dissects colonial cinematic representations of Indigenous people.

Post Me to the Prime Minister, a collection of poems published in 2004, 12 years before that formidable work, also deals with issues faced by First Nations people. As I was reading it, I kept wishing I could see Romaine Moreton perform them. I’ve just been told that she opened for Sweet Honey in the Rock at the Sydney Opera House on one of their visits to Australia, which makes complete sense. The short film she made with Erica Glynn, A Walk with Words: The Poetry of Romaine Moreton (2024), ends with her performing the book’s final poem, ‘I will surprise you by my will’ (you can rent or purchase the whole film at this link). The poem is in the film’s trailer:

we are here and we are many,
and we shall surprise you by our will,
we wll rise from this place where you expect 
to keep us down,
and we shall surprise you by our will.

There are so many riches in this collection, but I’ll stick to my arbitrary practice of singling out page 77. It’s the second page of a long poem, ‘Once upon a patriarchy’. Here’s a pic of pages 76 and 77:

The book’s title comes from the poem’s opening lines:

truth be known,
you would very much prefer it 
if I were male

oh yes you would wrap me in glad tidings 
and post me to the prime minister and say 
how proud we are

___ our son

Things have moved a long way since the moment in the 1972 movie Ningla A-Na when Indigenous women argued vehemently that sexism was a white women’s issue, that Indigenous women needed to support Indigenous men and not challenge their sexist behaviour. More than 30 years later, this poem’s speaker doesn’t have to be defensive about the ‘colonial gaze’; it’s not written with a non-Indigenous reader foremost in mind. The strength of First Nations communities no longer depends on papering over the cracks of lateral oppression.

It’s not easy to tell who ‘you’ is in this poem. At first it may be the speaker’s parents, or perhaps a part of the First Nations population that has a parent-like relationship to her. But it shifts, and by the start of page 77 it is a First Nations man, ‘our son‘, who is being addressed. He’s a man who wishes ‘to walk as the colonial / hallowed one’. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see him as similar to the would-be assimilationist Tomahawk in Alexis Wright’s great novel Praiseworthy (2023), or perhaps as a member of Chelsea Watego’s ’emerging tribe’ of self-appointed leaders (see the essay ‘ambiguously Indigenous’ in Another Day in the Colony, also published in 2023).

for while you vie 
for the passenger seat
the cattle truck is loaded for market
you have left me golden hallowed son

dragging 
in
the never-never

This is beautifully complicated. There’s sibling rivalry – ‘golden hallowed son’ is a variant on ‘golden-haired boy’, the favoured sibling, favoured partly because he’s male. But it’s not just that. He has decided to be part of the action, be up front in the cattle truck, join in the extractive farming of the land. He’s not in the driver’s seat, not in charge of his own destiny, but has attached himself to the power. To reinforce the farm metaphor, the poem brings in the Australian colonial ‘classic’, Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn’s We of the Never Never (1908). I haven’t read that book, but I’m pretty sure its account of Mangarayi and Yungman who were displaced by the Elsey cattle station, and worked on it, fits the tone of these lines – a place to be left dragging.

The next lines continue to reproach, and to remind the ‘son’ of the loyalty shown by Black women. (See the scene in Ningla A-Na mentioned above.)

and while I never ever forget you 
you gladly allow me – the black female
to rot

like the wife of Lot 
though I have never 
turned
I captured you to my breast 
always remembered 
what is best

for my people 
for my people

Whatever else is going on with the ‘son’ his maleness is key, as is the speaker’s femaleness. The reference to Lot’s wife (who looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment) broadens the picture: women have always been punished. In this case, though, there’s not even the pretext of he having done something wrong.

If you weren’t noticing the music of the poem previously, you can’t help but hear it here. These lines, with the rhyming of ‘rot’ and ‘Lot’, introduce a new rhythm that builds, with the rhyme of ‘breast’ and rest’, to the lovely repetition of ‘for my people’. When performing some of her poems, Romaine Moreton moves from spoken word to song. These lines cry out for that treatment.

One of my favourite words in poetry is ‘but’. And here it comes:

but you
golden hallowed blackened son 
more despised there is none

The ‘son’ is not just ‘golden hallowed’, but ‘golden hallowed blackened’: sitting in the passenger’s seat doesn’t make him immune from racism. ‘Blackened’ is an interesting word here: it signifies First Nations identity, but also colonial attitudes. He may think of himself as the golden son, but his Black identity will be imposed on him and he will be seen accordingly through a colonial lens: ‘none more despised’. That’s something that the man on the receiving end of racism would readily agree to. And then the killer lines:

except one

which is me

That’s not the end of the poem, it does move on interestingly, but it’s all I’m looking at here.

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Steve Armstrong, What’s Left

Posted on 25 Mar 2024 | 1 comment

Steve Armstrong, What’s Left (Flying Island Poets 2021)

The Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series books are close to irresistible. They’re beautifully designed and small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, but much more substantial in their content than their size might suggest. The RRP has been kept at $10 since the series began in 2010, and it’s possible to become a Friend for an annual fee of $100 to receive roughly 12 books each year.

I recently became a Friend, and received What’s Left, published in 2021, along with the swag of 2024 titles.

Steve Armstrong is a Newcastle poet. I like Mark Tredinnick’s description of him as a poet of ‘landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss’. Mark Tredinnick may be the Mark to whom the poem ‘This Morning’ (page 58) is dedicated – a poem that has the brilliant opening lines:

_____________ my sorrows pause
for a pair of black cockatoos in flight.

It’s probably pushing it to take those lines as encapsulating the book’s themes: but there are plenty of sorrows, and plenty of attentiveness to the natural world. The sorrows include regret, or at least ambivalence at having wielded axes and chain-saws. I enjoyed a lot in these poems, but probably most of all the way they communicate complexity. Sometimes they do this with a comic edge, as in ‘A Visit ot the Turkey Farm’ (page 33), in which the poem’s speaker buys two boxes of frozen turkey necks, takes them home and chops them up, in his kitchen, with an axe. If there’s a perfectly rational explanation for all this, the poem doesn’t bother with it. I don’t usually quote the final lines of poems, but this is irresistible:

To swing an axe in the kitchen feels

a little like reaching back for my hunter-
gatherer roots, and it's undeniable, there's

something of a serial killer about me too.

The book’s title is rich with possibility. I happened to visit the Melbourne Triennial when I had read to page 50 or so, and can’t resist including here a snap of the life-sized figure hanging from the ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria entitled What’s Left.

Elmgreen & Dragset,
What’s left, fig. 2
at the Melbourne Triennial

Judging by the couple of poems about children and grandchildren, Steve Armstrong isn’t as young and buff as this figure, and though the climate crisis looms in these pages, the the tone is perhaps more elegiac than panicky. The title poem, ‘What’s Left’ (page 10) offers the image of light falling on what’s left of red in a rusted iron roof: ‘light / falls for the broken’ in that poem and perhaps in the collection as a whole.

If you get a chance to read ‘Thirteen Ways to Know my Grandfather’, grab it. It won the 2019 local prize in the prestigiousNewcastle Poetry Prize and was included in NPP’s 2019 anthology Soft Serve. This is no cuddly grandpa, but a man who tyrannised his children (‘my mother learned to redact’) and grandchildren, including possibly some sexual abuse. The poem doesn’t rest in victimhood or resentment, but embraces complexity, not only in the grandfather’s wartime experience as explanation of his ‘thousand yard stare’, but also in an understanding of what he needed from his grandchildren:

he relied on us to be swift of mind.
_____________________________ We were the morning sun
glancing off the many faces of a still, dark mountain; 
our percipience bound by what we could bear.

Since 2021, Steve Armstrong has had another book of poetry published: One River (Puncher & Wattmann 2023) is a series of haibun written in response to walking the Hunter River and its tributaries.

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