Koel

The preface to Jen Crawford’s Koel is worth exploring in detail before discussion of its poems for a few reasons. Crawford explains some of her creative process, and issues a generous, and inclusive request of her reader, as equal, as collaborator:

It seemed important to be as close to sleep as possible, so I closed windows and wore headphones. Not to shut things out or make them stranger, but to soften and modulate the tensions of exchange. (ix)

By inviting the reader to be an active participant, rather than sole, passive receiver of words and imagery laid out by the author, Crawford is asking us to bring our own collaborative workings and background to experiencing the text. She mentions that most of Koel was written in Singapore, and is set in Auckland, Bicol, Bangkok, and ‘somewhere else, entirely see-through’ (ix) – this last location is intriguing, and where the reader can explore these collaborative possibilities. Additionally considering Foucault’s ‘epoch of simultaneity’, we can end up with several ways to read the poems that follow:

not all spaces are equally accessible to thought or description … the body’s ability to accumulate and to disperse, to be near and far … Memory, presence, and imagination fold and run together. I was looking for gaps to step through, for ways both forward and back. (ix)

The first two sections in ‘abandoned house music’ are quite challenging to absorb fully, though not due to the language, or sparseness of the text. As an inner-city writer and reader, constructing enough of a cocoon from urban development and traffic is quite tricky, but stripping away one’s internalised noise is worth the effort:

first call

koel                                                                                       koel

soft as police [...] telescope body expanding its creamy bows

: your standing is a gate

: & yours              outlines a slipper

[...]

a sun-drop

koel

[...]

(1, 3, 4, 5)

Ways of viewing and seeing are described in a synaesthetic neutrality of sorts, ‘telescope body / expanding its creamy bows’ (4), yet human presence and investment, a human-animal-space cohabitation of earth becomes more evident with:

: your standing is a gate : & yours              outlines a slipper

Here is a meeting of shadows, or outlines, or a human indoors while the bird is outside? Consider also the combination of usage of nouns as active verbs (with present participle), and vice versa:

• your standing (noun, as ‘stance’)
• a gate (noun)
• & yours (the act of outlining: verb)
• your standing (auxiliary verb with present participle – ‘you are standing’)
• a gate (verb, active; the koel ‘gates’)
• & yours (the act of standing: noun, as ‘stance’)
• & yours (your standing: noun, and existing as an outline: noun)
• & yours (active verb is ‘to stand’)
• & yours (active verb is ‘to outline’)
• & yours (your standing as noun, and outlining, verb)
• a slipper (noun), and lastly,
• a slipper (noun which is acted upon to cause it to be slippered)
• a slipper (verb, active; the koel ‘slippers’ the human in its shadow)

There is most likely a mathematical formula that could work out all possible permutations and combinations of the above suggested ‘readings’. The two lines I’ve chosen to scan are also actually the title of a poem within its section. Throughout the work, the reader is encouraged to create, modify, and delight in their own readings. Divya Victor’s comprehensive introduction also suggests a plethora of such interpretation and collaboration when stating that:

Crawford tills the ecological value of mnemonic and affective archives – where an early subjective attachment to the natural overcomes exploitative human-nature relationships. Koel creates a third mindscape that explores cohabitant intimacies across species within the warm and dewy contexts of childhood memory, adolescent desire, and the adult effort to survive without harming other creatures. (xi-xii)

Where ‘circles and mosses of (Singapore) tilt and transect others … (to) somewhere else, entirely see-through’ (ix) is most evident in ‘a crossing’ from the last section entitled ‘soft shroud’. This particular poem became for me a more personal gateway into the work as a whole. My mind began to mesh childhood memories of living and staying in a then third-world typhoon-stricken Filipino village, to arrive in the gloomy outer north Melbourne which seemed a disjointed mélange of rural countryside with newish British-style country houses, and American-style weatherboard ones decaying, or under construction.

As I write this review, my rereading of ‘a crossing’ has a diegetic soundtrack, both of local fauna, and mass transit vehicles. Again, Crawford asks the reader to accept that constructions for humans, made by humans, can exist simultaneously within and without nature, as well as somewhere in between. These spaces have a neutrality in them if we look at the nature-culture dichotomy as base polarities. Could they be thought of as postcapitalist or decolonised spaces?

The reading I want to suggest asks you to imagine that you are wading through murky flood water, and that paved paths do not exist, and that you are trying to get back to the house where extended family were brought up in relative poverty. The tin roof may be missing in some spots, and it is leaking from several familiar spots into ready-positioned basins.

a crossing

smashed scattering   bulwarks

blond splinters     circling

it was        ‘someone’s coming out for our furniture

(unhinged gate & circle     drive bursting

feet swollen    seats

face-up         nestmates

imploring

‘sky  sky  honey the roof’s gone  honey the walls oh

soak your ankles   look out

perimetres               fully ponding

look

(51)

long drawback

low surge

spread earth eats

years   goods           matchstick restarts

splinter   bed   circling

solder                                              water

(52)

long walk

long wavelength

(53)

nestmates             loosed

glyphs                curling                                   weight

over a desert’s                   honey sliding

carrying        that old life on

through foot print  cell   holes            live

and none

(the carried unseen

dipping their feet in under

(54)

The reader could imagine that the words of these four pages are rendered onto translucent, semi-opaque material ‘sheets’, and that these sheets flow to hit the ground. They are not entirely stationary, and you can ‘walk’ through them should you choose, and the resistance is similar to that of walking waist-deep through a body of sea’s current pushing against your body slightly. An amalgamation of Clara Bradley’s work for Tenderness Journal where the artist embroiders words onto satinesque fabric, and Alan Robinson’s ‘Forest’ where ‘strands’ of yarn in hang in varying lengths in a semi-enclosed, barely illuminated room enables the reader to imagine that they are wading through a flood, as best rendered by Crawford’s sequence in Koel.

Another imagining of ‘a crossing’ could also be assembled as follows; taking each of these four pages of text, printed onto transparent sheets designed for overhead light projectors, one could envision a syntactical flood by trying to read the legible words. This approach also works for ‘a cut ’:

to the armsto the caravan of bodiesroudcouncil of knifebeaks to a dry dawnbehindto the bodies’ thin cathedrals    shade stretched wing shadefor grey lips & shade for standing                         at the edge of the hole                             weight in arms          

(55-56)

Here, the text in bold is what is legible when the (paper) page is held up to light. It is a possible realisation of what Divya Victor says Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘haecceity’ - ‘an absolute limit of being entangled in assemblage with ‘an atmosphere, an air, a life’, and how the poems that make up Koel can be construed as ‘a single day or … all the days of life moving in grand and feminine interdependence between biological causality and phenomenological existence …’ (xii).

Despite one full reading, and future attempted rereadings, many more interpretations and collaborations of Koel still feel possible, and yet to be explored. It is initially hard work, and manages to strike a curious balance in its provocation of fresh wonder, with its sophisticated, relatable imagery, and an intuitive yet experimental stretching of grammatical conventions. I confess that it will be difficult to merely hear a bird call and not consider its poetic possibilities – for this book, and for others’ work.