apparently
This exhilarating collection of word play begins offstage. Words mutter and chatter to each other, sometimes getting meaning across to us, sometimes keeping it to themselves. Here is (in full) the poem ‘planchette’, in the first section of the book, ‘planchettes’:
the anarchy of sober
noodles does the buck
stop here crazy logic
of lava citadels the swanky
ambiguity of matador pants
a breach in the futurosity of
time blini addicts duck
and cover in their ancestral
glug boots down the blackholes
of juvenilia cosy as irish moss (p 10)
We wander through various moods in ‘international séancery’ (p 17), happily reminded that in some forms of fortune telling, wheeled wooden planchettes are used to take us from thought to thought, like little skateboards for our unconscious.
In the next section, ‘apparently’, burns takes us on a tour of places, living and remembered, which act as sources: reminiscences, dream landscape, youthful inspiration, fantasy. ‘evaluation sheet’ starts out with ‘I didn’t pop over to epidaurus to visit the theatre’ (p 16). A page or two later we move on from ‘a shady house: perhaps californian bungalow’ (p 18), through ‘a vaulted hall. an assembly, a reunion. visitation.’ (p 19) ‘purchase’ (p 23) begins with ‘a long dark table with rounded bevelled corners’ and then says exactly where we stand:
you stand at the edge of the dream. close enough to
touch the table but you don’t. there is both an intimacy
and a remoteness about its presence.
The poem ends:
two months of dreams later someone offers you a thick
booklet of $100 notes in exchange for a small poem.
but which poem. the currency is too bright. the
colour of cheap lime cordial. ‘but I don’t do sweet’ you
say. ‘sorry’. (p 24)
The first two sections of the collection feel like an experiment in creating language: In ‘prop’ (p 21), we start out ‘macbeth was coming up the stairs, for us to study. who were we? where was i?’ We look at different versions of the play and then settle down:
a copy of the play landed on the carpet next to the
armchair I had appropriated, reminding me to stay in
the present, tuned. ah, that’s the one I last taught from:
the hardback arden edition. durable and tough and still
functioning after decades of mis-use.
Once we have found our place, though, we can travel light (‘prima vera’ p 20):
whoever booked me on the flight forgot my luggage.
i texted it to meet me at the whitsunday terminal. ‘how
will i recognise you’ it replied. ‘by the ampersand in my
hair’ i said.
What are we going to do with language, now that we have created it? This is answered in the third and largest section, ‘dial’. The poems here are in political language; my first impression is that we are hearing about ‘flat-pack civilisation’ assembled from megastores, in poems that are grounded in one psychological centre, in one personality.
One source of consistency is in the various mentions of ‘the harbour’ throughout this section, as though the landscape were the physical site for everything else that’s going on. In ‘dispatch box’ (p 40) we are asked:
is this a cartoon or a toyworld fest:
sealed unsinkable for export delivery […]
along our sovereign coast, waterways, and harbour
shores sleek white watercraft gleam and purr with
plutocratic pride
Later, in ‘stent’ (p 53):
a golden morning the harbour gleaming
all the way to manly margaret adores the
stillness in the air time to settle back with
‘dracula’
as if on cue it starts the stentorian leaf
blower down below in the concrete car
park
The poem ‘canary’ (p 60) links the visible harbour with a long-ago pit stop on a Greek cruise:
today the harbour like lake placid no
no citizen whines in its suv stroller a
woman on a ferry waves with
some vigour to a boy in the frame
of a miniature window one of a million
on a mammoth cruise ship
But there’s not much hope out there, on or off the water. The last section, ‘the random couch’, presents decline and decay, an elegy entirely, without hope of renewal. (And this is pre-2020, keep in mind.) ‘entrée’ (p 71) ends, ‘where did lucy in the sky with diamonds go –`
We are left with no place to stand, not even a harbour to triangulate—though at this moment we have a wonderfully written book to console ourselves with for a bit. Here in full is the last poem in the book, ‘crunch’ (p 72). It gets us back to the planchettes, John Donne and the poet’s unquenchable joy in words:
fulfilling those dreams
with cornflakes wasn’t as easy
as it smelt faux crunch of
the necromancer ankle
wrinkles don’t disappear with
a spray and wipe can you
bear a curse of no_winged
sandals the sun shines too
much you’re the busy old
foole hatless in the lethargic
plaza the grounds shift
bitter beneath your eyes
such an indifferent barista
you grab at the walls of
next week’s hallways it
all seems so familiar
This is a collection to puzzle over, to cackle over and to enjoy—it’s a deep pleasure to see a poet and the language meeting as equals and enjoying the encounter so thoroughly.
apparently. joanne burns. Giramondo Publishing Company: 2019. ISBN: 978-1925818-09-3