Null or Colour

In the Indian subcontinental context as I have experienced it – the contemporary, international art world as it locates itself in Kochi and Mumbai as well as the familial conversations in my ancestral village in Kerala – Kabir looms as a particularly important figure. He is, perhaps, the most cited poet even as there are many references to Tamil Sangam poetry as well. I would hazard a guess that Arvind Krishna Mahrotra is better known as one of Kabir’s translators rather than as a poet in his own right. His work to bring Kabir more fully into the present frame, especially with New York Review Books, has meant greater exposure to readers like me than his creative expressions. That was how I came to know his name. The volume under review here acts as a corrective to such a view, which is a welcome relief, and one that opens itself out to a fecund reality of poetic possibility.

And yet, one must surely acknowledge the deep-seated traditions that Mehrotra participates in, of which Kabir is simply one part. Kabir then is a sort of influence on the poetry in Collected Poems and when read in this way, one notices faultlines and tendencies that would not be out of place in the older poet’s work, and which firmly situate Mehrotra in a pre-national "Indian" tradition concerned with daily life, family, commerce, work, and love. To make Mehrotra intelligible to a local audience however, Giramondo state on their website that his influences have been William Carlos Williams and the Beats, also making sure to suggest that he is similar to local poets here in Australia from the 1970s and 80s. This connective tissue will hopefully help expand the readership for Mehrotra’s fine work, which is itself an opening to other poets (Pavankumar Jain, Mangalesh Dabral and others who are also represented here).

Collected Poems is a handsome volume and presents work from 1972 to the present, including translations and new poems. The translations make up almost one third of the 300 or so pages, and poets and publishers in Australia could learn from this example. Translation is not a common enough practice to my mind, nor is the Australian publication of international poetries. Mehrotra helps us with that. And yet, this is only one of the reasons that Collected Poems appealed to me.

I particularly enjoyed reading through the movements that see Mehrotra change over time, even as there are common motifs, forms and content. We notice a curious eye concerned with the quotidian and the political. There is work that is imagistic ("January", 56), direct ("In Switch Licour", 106), parable-like ("Bhojpuri Descant", 81), moral ("Summer Notes", 123), and always engaged. In terms of Mehrotra’s arc there is a refining of his earlier poems even as the concerns remain similar – for example "India" matters in 1974 ("Ballad of the Black Feringhee", 5) and today’s new poems ("A Hindu Panegyrist Remembers Sultan Mahmud", 161, and "Our Generation", 165).

For a specific way in which Mehrotra’s work has become more focused, one can turn to the first poem in the volume and the last prior to the translations. The first – "Fantomas" – reads:

She went never to return She went and her twisted arm entered A length of intestine came in through the skylight She sent a steaming cauldron in which she’d cooked her nails Her toe whizzed past Then her button with a piece of thread attached like a tail Then a whole eyelash Her short hair bounced into the room, a black rabbit Her nose hopped erratically, looking for its twin Greetings from her armpits’ two tiny hedgehogs Her leg beams from outer space.

The first and last stanzas of the final poem, ‘The Nulla-Nulla in Nullah’, which was written forty four years later, read:

There’s ire in fire, a ban in turban, A rind in tamarind, a listen in glisten, A reed in greedy, umber in lumber, And the other way round. … … There’s tawny in mulligatawny, a ling in lingerie, An end in endoscopy, an Abba in Abbot, A squirr in squirrel, a devi in devil, And the other way round, and the other way round.

The playfulness of the content has given way to a playfulness with language itself, and the setting has been relocated from a domestic dystopia to the surface of the poem. And yet, there is a continued attentiveness to details, the body, and a charged, dynamic sensibility. The last poem struck me as particularly illustrative of Collected Poems’ new poems for they often reach from one type of India (mainly Northern) to another type of Australia (slightly kitsch). After all, a "nulla-nulla" is a "club" for Indigenous people here, and "nullah" is Urdu for a "watercourse".  But then tawny is like a tawny frogmouth owl and mulligatawny is an English soup with origins in Madras (Chennai). It is this final link that so firmly enmeshes India with Australia, for both of them share in a colonial understanding of the English language and culture that is also on display in this book. Where we might learn more deeply from Mehrotra is to have a local tradition (our own Kabir for example) as part of an ongoing network (other translated poets) that nevertheless reflects on history and personal experience with a sense of language’s contingency, potential, beauty, fun and depth. And that, surely, is more than enough to make this volume of poetry worth reading and investing in.

On Remembrance Day, we stood in the classroom, jarrah floorboards underneath, something that both state housing and state schools had in those days. Had we listened on the radio to the stories of Simpson and his donkey? As part of the legacy of World War One, Gallipoli was told as a tragedy from teachers and historians of the right age to have had parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, sisters and brothers participate. At least in my experience, though it is not necessarily the experience of Robyn Rowland, the author of This Intimate War (McBride 2015).

As part of this day we stood for one quiet moment on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. A commemoration of the armistice that halted the war to end all wars. Elevens loom strongly for parts of western history. Poppies are another such symbol – the symbol of Remembrance Day. The deep black heart of the red flower a reflection of loss and misery. The implied opiate needed perhaps to overcome the pain and the enormity of the casualties – to fool humans into fighting (“. . . poppy seeds, perhaps enough / to charm a winged monkey, put a lion to sleep / on their trudge behind the rainbow”, 112). ANZAC Day is commemorated on April 25^th – the day that Australia and New Zealand joined forces and set out for Gallipoli – and along with Remembrance Day, carries with it, for me, sober reflection on death, not glory. Simpson was remembered for his role as a stretcher-bearer, after all, not for valiant battles (Australian War Memorial n.d.).

Stories of the day when both sides stopped, gathered their dead and shared cigarettes were broadcast into our classroom (Sydney Morning Herald 2008). Rowland reflects on this camaraderie between supposed enemies in her poem "Close", 36-40. World War One, for Australia, in some aspects went down in history as a war that conned the people, and the people seemed to control the narrative for some of the time. That is, until those who originally participated passed away, and ANZAC day was appropriated as an exercise in jingoism, though propaganda from the times also played upon and encouraged nationalistic sensibilities, as reflected in "Children of Gallipoli", 42-45. (See also, Akça 2015; Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre [KSP Writers' Group] 2015, May 2015). Alan Seymour’s play, The One Day of the Year, certainly regarded it as a flag-waving celebration to be avoided, and maybe it has devolved to that again (Delaney 2015).

Rowland uses this reflection, reflects on this jingoism, and incredibly diversifies this war narrative in her poems. That diversification goes beyond national identity, or includes more identities within that record, by covering all those that war affects, but who are maybe not officially remembered, mourned or lauded. The book is translated into Turkish by Mehmet Ali Çelikel, and the Turkish script sits alongside the original. This fact alone widens the potential audience, acknowledges more stakeholders, and broadens the intention of the account. Inclusive as opposed to polarised. Us, rather than “us and them”, even while that theme is also explored. Gallipoli was fought on foreign soil after all, and the soil was not foreign to those who lived there.

As the title suggests, this is also an intimate book for Rowland (her sister-in-law is Turkish), as much as it is an important historical document, giving voice to those often lost in this wartime depiction – the minority soldiers, Aboriginal, Maori, Scottish, Irish, child; the Turkish; the women left at home in many countries; the women at war on either “side”; the doctors, the nurses, the deserters, the fearful, the questioning; those left behind, those returned to; war in art, in music, in consciousness, in cynical policy, in misguided loyalty – all are covered. The majority sacrificed for a powerful minority, as always seems the way with the actual intent of war (Akça 2015), have a voice within this collection. Rowland terms it as “not a history”, but as “poetry out of history” (2016, 179).

The women, Turkish and British, who in their respective countries took on tasks previously deemed to be out of the female realm, gain a voice as Rowland outlines their contributions to war efforts, including supporting the military machine that might ultimately kill their own kin. The Turkish women have special dispensation to remove their head scarves while packing bullet casings. Did it make them closer to God, or more removed? The British women who wasted their youth creating weapons to kill their own young, albeit indirectly, and the tragic stories of those who went down the mines in the name of destruction, never able to reproduce life again, are explored. And the question is asked, “What if we just said no?” ("Production Lines", 54-57).

A Turkish mother receives letters from her deceased son, secretly packed into sardine tins, inadvertently returned to her ("Second Skin", 94-95). The censors on either side would not allow the reality of fear and questioning to be communicated, lest it spread like wildfire, especially amongst the troops ("Luck", 86-89). She sits with a spoon of jam, suspended, preserve oozing along her skin, immobilized in her grief for at least two hours, with the refrain that she needs to clean up, much like the "mopping up" (46-54) needed as medical teams patched together broken men in order to break them again, and in the way the allied forces retreated from Gallipoli once the order was finally given ("‘Anybody left? Anybody left? No?’", 80-86). The symbolism of the jam, plum, her son’s favourite, is not lost.

It returns in the last poem of the collection, "Poppy-picking" (112-15) where poppies are again poppies, and jam is jam, and combined, they are both. Physical items able to give and replenish life rather than representatives of loss. The protagonist of the poem, the “we”, the Irish-Australian Rowland, possibly, and her Turkish family, pick "bucket" and "basket" loads of the flower to make lokum, a Turkish sweet. Now the protagonist is ready to return to “a country where red poppies only ever meant / grief over fields full of the bodies of dead young men, / a generation of women left unmarried, alone”, with the poppy-syrup-infused confection that leaves “the sweetness of jam on the tongue” (114). Poppies are used, not as a symbol of remembrance for those gone before their time, or an escape from horrors endured, nor as a symbol of blood spilt, but as a fruit, as a flower, whose parts can be used to create jam for the living to savour, to provide sustenance for bees (“Pollen-loaded stems are / shocked, naked, worrying how to attract bees”, 114). Poppies revert to a regenerative role, and jam becomes a reminder of life-affirming experiences, rather than its opposite.

Simpson died after just four weeks of gathering bodies (Australian War Memorial, n.d.). Rowland writes of personal loss, such as in "Second Skin", but she also writes of the broad sweep of the same. Fatalities through the Great War (and as a result of) were acute, and this acuity has been a common theme in western literature, both at the time and after. Many claim the battles of Gallipoli and the war as a defining moment for the newly federated Australia (Akça 2015). In fact, Peter Lalor’s grandson, also Peter Lalor, was killed at Gallipoli (Greenmount Primary School 2015, 170). However, the substantial combination of mass warfare (possibly the first for our modern times) and human flesh ("Sky Fighting", 74-77; Rowland 2016) strafed not just the skin of the soldiers.

Rowland often writes of the bay and other areas as crimson or scarlet with the blood of men gunned down, but not just men (26-28; 34-35; 46-53). The horses and mules too. Drawing on Sydney Nolan’s art, she describes their legs protruding like periscopes, swollen and bloated floating in the water (102). Elsewhere, their dead bodies are lined along the shore, having been shot at retreat, their services no longer required. “Lines of dead horses shock the Turkish scout” (82). The landscape itself is barren and intimidating, though also bitterly idealised as green and welcoming, through the eyes of, and as an analogy of, youths sent to their deaths ("Nightingale", 30-33).

The physical harm of war is immediate, but the sociological and psychological harm reverberates throughout the following decades, and as one war piles upon the other, resounds still. As mentioned above, Rowland’s sister-in-law is Turkish, and she herself has an Irish-Australian background (Mcbride 2015). Reading through the poems and reviews on the collection, the groundwork that was put into their creation is apparent, research leading to fortuitous discoveries such as coming across paintings commemorating scenes from Gallipoli by Fehmi Korkut Uluğ (III Cankkale revisited, 104-10), one of which graces the cover of the collection.

Turkish Uluğ was born 1945, but his grandfather was in Gallipoli (Rowland 2016), and he might retain a closeness to the effects of conflict that an Australian born in the nineties would be hard-pressed to feel. Perhaps humans only have the capacity to consider the importance of wars in terms of their destruction for a century or so, as generations with first-hand experience, whether that be through their parents or grandparents, die out. The Boer War was certainly something I was not mindful of until the release of Breaker Morant, and many argue, including Rowland, that Peter Weir’s Gallipoli defined and changed their perception of Australia’s involvement in the campaign (Rowland 2016; Akça 2015). Fundamentally, though, the experience of the generations before impacts those after, as described in the stanza below about Uluğ’s grandfather.

In Last Photo Before Death there are only 10 soldiers, as if a close-upshot was taken. And a young deer. But in the black-and-white image from 1915 there are 80 men, all sitting, two dogs and the deer curled up, ears pricked – the 12^th infantry division from Izmir. Uluğ's grandfather is Hasan Fehmi, fifth man from the right, handsome, his back upright, moustache even. Wounded, he will be the only man left. Binoculars hang from his neck, his face half-shadowed, tired, resigned, set-jawed. Each anniversary following – for nine years before his death – he will offer a prayer at the mosque for each of his fallen comrades. It must have taken a long time.

(108).

Whether that reflection has the strength to stem the onslaught of the war machine has yet to be seen.

Rowland writes of the flowers appropriated from the earth to represent the people, animals, histories and cultures who sank into the earth and other forms of abyss to die and suffer for policy not written by their own hand. She returns to the flowers that spring from the earth, the tulips in “mosque gardens” and daffodils in “church parks,” (54) and poppies. The last in particular she reclaims so that they represent “friendship in spring, wild flowering and its fruit” (114). Shells on the Gallipoli front burst “open their flowering death” (54), but Rowland urges us to not temper such destruction with dissociated metaphor, with absence (98-101). As such, she encourages the reader to honour and seek that which nurtures the human spirit, even in reflection of loss, rather than that which neuters connection and denies the intimacy that lies between human and human, human and earth.

I first came to Martin Harrison through his critical work, specifically his book of collected essays Who Wants to Create Australia? (2004). For myself and for many others, Harrison’s presence in Australian poetry criticism has offered a continuous point of return, a generous and challenging source for the poet and scholar alike. Harrison’s critical voice was immense, incarnating as radio producer / teacher / critic / academic, an immensity that has only heightened in the wake of his death, as the reach and abundance of just how much work Harrison produced has been revisited. This is so much the case that it can be argued that a "Martin Harrison-ness" has emerged in Australian poetry, recognisable as a certain branch of ecopoetics, with the problematic construct of  "Australia" as the discursive equation of that thinking.

In Who Wants To Create Australia? Harrison identifies conceptual lacunae in the way we talk about our poetic histories. He writes:

Classifying systems, largely derived from English and American critics and historians are applied to Australian writing, as if genetic accounts and histories of evolution similar to those of British and American writing can be mapped equidistantly across the structures of connection, response and contact which form the local histories of a local art. Borrowed terms like “pastoral”, “urban” and “landscape” for instance may work very differently or simply may not work at all. (2004, 78-79)

Harrison’s criticism, and the development of that criticism by his contemporaries including Stuart Cooke, Bonny Cassidy and Michael Farrell, is a step toward filling this gap in Australian poetics. But how exactly is this critical thinking embodied in Martin Harrison the poet, how has Martin Harrison developed Australian Poetry as a poet as well as a critic, how do these two modes of operation merge? What exactly is the "Martin Harrison-ness" of Martin Harrison? Harrison’s critical concerns emerge throughout his career as a poet, however in Happiness there is a new and more urgent searching mode that supersedes previous collections.

***

In an ABC Poetica broadcast from 2011 containing an interview and readings with Martin Harrison, I count Harrison use the refrain “in a sense”, or some variation of it, fourteen times. Of course, I am not the first to recognise the potency that Harrison’s frequent use of the phrase carries, as one not to be overlooked as a conversational glitch.  Kate Fagan’s essay, “'In a Sense': Sonic Phenomena, Temporal Scale and Ecological Encounter in Martin Harrison’s ‘White-Tailed Deer’” (2015), hones in on Harrison’s conversational and poetic reverberation, exploring the immersive sensory state of the poem ‘White-Tailed Deer’ (51-53), Fagan takes the refrain as referring specifically to Harrison’s interest in the experience of being within a sense. Fagan begins:

I have always taken “in a sense” to be a metonymic expression of deferral and qualified analogy - this, what I am saying here, is replaceable by and connected to many other possible ways of saying. This is also this and that. But in reading “White-Tailed Deer” I have come to understand a different meaning for the phrase, more calibrated philosophically to Harrison’s life-long inquiries into writing and thought, and to his indefatigable explorations of “the poem” as a metaphor for listening to the sense of things. (2015, n. pag).

Undoubtedly, Fagan’s treatment of ‘White-Tailed Deer’ is acute and insightful, but I would also argue that Fagan’s initial understanding of “in a sense” as “metonymic expression of deferral … connected to many other possible ways of saying” (n. pag) is as equally significant in tracing the connection between Harrison’s critical thinking and his poetry.

An interest in multiplicity, of allowing ‘x’ to also be ‘y’, of relishing partiality and plurality, has long been central to Harrison’s interests. In an interview with Adam Aitken, Harrison states:

It seems to me that in this country you have got to have a many-levelled sense of place ... You have got somehow to have this double vision of spaces and places. They do have multiple histories – they 
have Aboriginal histories, early settler histories, contemporary histories and so on. You’ve somehow got to keep these things together. (Harrison and Aitken 2014)

For Harrison, poetry is a way of keeping these things together, of allowing for multiplicity and producing a poetry of place that does not bring with it an attempt to colonise or to reduce environments to serving a poem’s speaker. The protean insights in Harrison’s work don’t hail down on a reader, perhaps because such sentiments are often undercut by a degree of uncertainty. In the elegy "Hundred’s of K’s of it" (63), Harrison uses the refrain “in the wind” to chart loss via the wind’s affect. With each line beginning with “in the wind”, Harrison manages to keep this repetition from feeling trite or tired. The poem builds in intensity and pace, producing startling lines like “in the wind which is inseparable from its own traced movement”, and later, “in warm wind utterly incapable yet bleating and blahing /– a squalling white blur –” (63).  "Hundred’s of K’s Of It" (63) opens with an ellipsis and closes unmarked by punctuation, as if lifted from the mind, from a series of unending contemplations of the wind and its many voices, which continually “returns to touch in a hundred different ways” (63).  The poem doesn’t choose a beknighted Romantic mode in which the existence of natural phenomena are dependent on their speaker, the wind has pseudo-agency and exists independently – a ‘fact’ both exhilarating and disturbing: it is “wind which, choosing distance, is away over there” (63) and  “has been here long before me” (63).

In his paper, ‘The Act of Writing and The Act of Attention" (2013), Harrison posits processes of evolution as central to a model for ecological writing, the work must, he argues, leave “open how it is a work, possibly leaving the question never resolved. The work is an evolving act of attention and attentiveness” (10).  Importantly, Harrison’s argument for openness isn’t tied exclusively to observations of environmental phenomena but relates also to his understanding of the poem as artifice.  Not only must these observations remain open, but the way in which they are approached and technically produced as poem must also remain open. More than ever, this presents itself in Happiness.

We see this specifically in experimentations with form, like "Leaving Paris" (29-33), a four part poem that was produced by following a list of instructions or poetic rules, and these were later departed from; in his ABC Poetica interview, Harrison is unable to recall what the list contained. As well as other rules, the list included writing “a very exaggerated image at a certain place in the poem, certain rhymes had to occur, certain disguised rhymes had to occur, certain syllable numbers had to be counted, certain gaps had to be put in, certain juxtapositions had to happen … ” (Poetica). The poem is perplexing and exciting, “ermmmmm oh words end like cauliflowers” (30), as well as incisive, “like the whole ensemble was a weather pattern more intense / than real rain hitting tin” (31). Importantly, this poem doesn’t feel like an experiment, as experiments sometimes do, like the way classical music sometimes just sounds like classical music. As readers, we aren’t made aware of the rules of this poem; by contrast with its restrictions the poem feels uninhibited and spontaneous. The practice by which this poem is created keeps the poem as artifice open; in restricting the poem and then moving away from those restrictions, Harrison gives it breath, allowing it to exist as a space independently from its creator.

In doing this, Harrison actively approaches the problematic nature of the term ecopoetics. In the same paper Harrison asks, “Is writing, including creative writing and its teaching, inevitably on the other side of the natural environment and ecological systems? Is writing, by definition, an action of a mindfulness and inventiveness which implicitly creates a cognitive separation between the world of the text and the world of ecological systems?” (2013, 1).  For Harrison, ecopoetics is a slippery term as it is separate from the ecology it addresses, an issue long held by many critics within the field. Kate Rigby presents this as her central problem with ecopoetics. Rigby proposes that ecopoetics, or any art form dealing with place, is “always at risk of functioning as a substitute for embodied experience of the land” (2004, 119); and that in doing so we lose a real connection to place and space, as “the work of art, always, inevitably, fails to convey the experience of which it is a trace” (2004, 119). This function is what she defines as an ecopoetics of negativity. Harrison argues that poetry of place cannot avoid its separation from the environment on which it is focused, as “all writing is after the moment, after the thought, after the fact, post hoc” (2004, 7). However, unlike Rigby, Harrison does not suggest that the text is separate from the world, rather the poem is something to experience within the world; it is not a reproduction or replacement of the natural environment, instead poems like "Leaving Paris", exist as a space in their own right.

In the long poem "Wallabies" (7-11) Harrison uses the title to point directly at what seems to be a straight observation, that being a mob of wallabies, only to then distort it, to move at and around it from all angles, charting both ecological and psychological webs. The speaker here is pulled in by noticing “out of time movement over dead stubble” (7), which is interrogated, “what’ve they been doing?” (7), and then held and abstracted by the point between noticing, remembering and recognition, “they’ve been hiding / in the mind, in the body” (7). The poem moves between marvelling at natural phenomena, “that low brown water’s thin mirror / as if the crowd of trees signaled to it, or had been / signaling all their lives” (7), deep feeling,  “as familiar as a body curled around yours each day / Just like when evaporating inland daybreak starts you wake”, and memory, “afternoon’s white flesh is the memory of this / the thing which is hidden like a name is hidden” (8); all of these are changeable and moving. The “Wallabies”, which Harrison points to in the title, don’t actually return until the poem’s final page, “wallabies two of them and then three over there then more”, not because they aren’t important or that the poem doesn’t depend on them, but rather because all of these things are completely interdependent and moving; knowledge here is not pinned down but rather each line is understood as “having known everything as the waking dreamer / knows everything for a scattered instant instantly gone” (10).

This is a fascination that reemerges in "White-Tailed Deer"; again Harrison points at one seemingly stable observation only to distort it, and then, not exactly turn away but rather dive in and abstract the encounter, the purpose of which is, as Fagan has it, “to chart the affective play of ecological encounters upon imaginations and sensory states” (2015, n. pag). These are poems with speakers, who, if you were to ask them a question, would return with another, or instead some seemingly unrelated yet canny insight, something “inextricable in feeling and movement and mood” (51).

Harrison acknowledges “interconnectedness with natural, biological and cosmological systems” (2013, 10) as key to ecological writing. Writing, he argues, cannot deny “a sense of intervention and participation in the natural world” (2013, 10). In other words, as writers we need to constantly consider the way we are connected to our environments. In Happiness, we see this best in Harrison’s focus on macro and micro environments and fragments, often expanding and retracting between the two in a single movement. These movements often last for what feels like an entire poem; it is difficult to lift one line from a poem as they frequently feel so connected to the line prior and the line that follows, and which follows that, and which follows that. Take these lines from "White Tailed Deer" as an example,

in a paddock where damp grass’s been drying out these last twenty minutes in a final sun cube whose shattered gleam just now has flooded through sprays of half-grown bluegums traces on the shed wall

(51)

Here, environments are constantly verbing in order to define the next environment, the damp grass dries out because of the final sun cube which sprays on the bluegums which traces the shedwall, there’s an endless sense of connection that eventually traces all the way to Upstate New York. There’s a moreishness or hunger within the poems of Happiness, an urgency in desire to keep moving from one connection to the next, line to line, poem to poem. Happiness is a collection to be experienced all at once, and then again and again. It is Martin Harrison at peak "Martin Harrison".

John Kinsella’s Graphology Poems: 1995-2015 – published by Five Island Press as a limited edition, three volume set – has been long anticipated. Kinsella hinted that the poems accumulating as part of the Graphology project may appear in a single volume as early as 1998, in an essay entitled “The Long Poem and the Sequence”. In the essay, he describes Graphology as a project “about how and why we write […] about the word itself, about the line, the stanza, the typography, font, the very page” (97). He adds that Graphology was “conceived right from the earliest drafts as being the long poem that one writes over a lifetime” (97). It’s a characterisation he repeats in the volumes’ introductory notes: we’re therefore dealing with a significant addition to the oeuvre of an important Australian poet. The publication of the three volumes provides the first opportunity to encounter and evaluate the work comprehensively.

"Graphology", Kinsella reminds us in his introductory notes, is a pseudoscience that claims that aspects of personality can be deduced by analysing a person’s handwriting. It requires an examination of form, movement and use of space, all of which are important stylistic and thematic considerations within the Graphology poems. The volumes feature – in places – reproductions of Kinsella’s handwriting, hand-drawn charts, scribbles and rudimentary drawings.

The Graphology poems, Kinsella says, were “often composed in a sequential and chronological format, [and] numbered accordingly”, though the numbering is regularly – and enigmatically – non-consecutive (1.13). Discrete clusterings of poems develop, then the sequence breaks off or shifts again, allowing themes and stylistic elements to modulate and re-emerge.

In “Graphology 3727: A Deformed Nautilus Is Surely More Perfect” and “Graphology Appendix 2: Spiralling”, Kinsella seems to offer the nautilus shell – renowned as a natural illustration of the “golden ratio” – as the antithesis of his sequence (2.208). Instead, he tenders the “deformed nautilus” or “triple spiral” as a model for the complexity of its structure:

Gold sections and golden rectangles but only a logarithmic spiral, though poets would have it golden and make more maths of their poems than poems possess: bend those stanzas and their word-orders, mimic sequences of numbers to find a place in the logic of Eternity

(2.208)

The poems are cumulative and faceted in their effect, even as their arrangement resists a neat summation. Nicholas Birns writes, in his essay on the poems, “we are not so much concerned with how and if the series will end, or even with a sense of progress or development through the series, as we are with the total effect of a set of instances that we know will never add up neatly.” The sequence isn’t readily conceptualisable by form or theme, as in some of Kinsella’s earlier books, such as The Silo (1995) or Divine Comedy (2008), or inflected with a distinctive characteristic, such as the strangeness that pervades Visitants (1999).

The energies and impulses of the poems, or clusterings of poems, remain in flux, creating a sense of impermanence or capriciousness. It requires some trust that an individual poem, or clustering of poems, is of-a-piece with the sequence, and creates a sustained tension in the work. A resistance to closure also allows the sequence’s inclusiveness of reference, from the organic to the cultural, which is itself an exploration and substantiation of identity. As Kinsella comments in “Graphology: Un-numbered Series 3”:

[…] It doesn’t matter whether or not this satisfies the rules of lyrical preservation, the law of reader satisfaction. It is a record, it is a witnessing.

(2.61)

The sequence ranges in its style and subject matter, including formalist and ekphrastic poems, such as the poems that respond to the works of icon painter Alexander Deriev and abstract painter Karl Wiebke.

The project is consciously and relentlessly, though not always overtly, political – if we accept the axiom that everything is political, as an assertion, rejection or disregarding of values. As Kinsella acknowledges in his introductory notes: “These are all poems of resistance and protest, even when affirming. I write to resist” (1.15). The poems return to many of the political and ecological concerns that recur in Kinsella’s poetry: salination, land clearing, the use of insecticides and herbicides, cultural imperialism, recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples, and – more broadly – a sustained critique of certain aspects of modernity (“When knowing was not search-engined”, 3.38). However, as David McCooey noted when launching the volumes, “In popular mythology, [Kinsella’s] politics sometimes gets more attention than his poetics. Of course one cannot separate the two.”

The sequence’s politics and poetics are spliced through language. The sequence is linguistically rich, with injections of wordplay (“Bard hair-day joy flourishes in whiff of quiff”, 2.255), humour and satire. Kinsella’s critique of modernity is expressed and enacted through language itself:

[…] watch out or we’ll super-size our right to freedom, extend the pusillanimous soft-drink musical download hand-gun freebies of the freest of the free world giveaways in your ‘battle for ideas’

(1.221)

Much of the sequence is concerned with notions of place, as Kinsella’s body of work has been: the poems are “revelations of locality and self”, he writes (1.21). The poems primarily feature the landscapes of Ohio and Cambridgeshire (where Kinsella teaches at Kenyon College and Cambridge University, respectively), and Western Australia’s wheatbelt. It’s particularly through the wheatbelt poems that Kinsella explores some of the sequence’s key preoccupations, including the act of witnessing and recording (“Making a record is barely witness, I know that, / but I am compelled”, 2.228), and rejecting claims of proprietary ownership. The landscapes are overlaid with their social and political contexts:

With parents born pre-Second World War we are vestiges of Elizabethan colonialism, plantations made into ‘the wheatbelt’, roots of western-white, a type of house paint for all weathers.

(3.178)

The sequence incorporates, with minimal amendments, a series of poems that was published as America, or, Glow (A Poem) in 2006. The America series – comprising forty-nine poems, most of them short – complements the project, yet retains its distinctiveness. It’s the clustering of poems that’s most overtly and consistently political, presenting Kinsella’s reaction to America’s political and social conservatism:

[…] God is pro-life, pro-strength, pro-family pro-space and pro-martial arts.

(1.213-14)

praise O holy Green Card, lottery Whitmanesque exclusive democracy and camouflage in school dining halls: the ‘bad’ food vending machines to be used only after lunch

(1.198)

The poems portray a flawed and damaged America that’s nonetheless retained its glamour: a promised land of privilege, opportunity, junk food and adolescent gun-violence.

Graphology Poems, particularly the third volume, includes many short, highly-distilled poems – for example, “Graphology Heuristics 83: Death by Identification” (quoted in its entirety):

Night parrots worked hard not to be found by the invasive, the protective and exploitative. ‘Found’, they know for certain they are extinct.

(3.172)

The poem brings to mind Kinsella’s 1989 collection of poems, Night Parrots, in which the title poem refers to the species, then believed to be extinct, with the refrain “If at all”. The species’ totemic and mythopoeic status in Australian poetry has been eradicated by the recent "(re)discovery" of several birds in western Queensland, rendering it extinct as a metaphor. According to Kinsella, it’s only by evading identification or detection that the birds can continue to exist. It’s telling, too, that Kinsella doesn’t distinguish between the “protective” and the “exploitative”.

Kinsella concedes: “I write a lot of vituperative verse” (3.226), but the sequence works towards glimpses of conciliation and optimism in the closing pages of the third volume. This movement reaches its apogee in “Graphology Appendix 11: Burlong Pool”:

and even now, just upriver, an excavator up to its rusting hocks in rocks and sand, a mining company extracting what it can from the artery of the valley. But the pool itself is working to health, and community has resurrected its fortunes – gatherings of black-winged stilts, a flight of teal, a spoonbill on a submerged flooded gum. Language is gifted on signs that do more than mark location and provide visitor information – they are statements of presence, of reclamation.

(3.229)

The poem describes the slow regeneration or reclamation of the river, after years of abuse by industry, mining companies and the military. It opens the sequence to the possibilities of renewal, expressed in religious or spiritual terms: resurrection, prayer, ritual, reverence and worship.

According to Kinsella, the Graphology project is “a lifework” (1.13). It is an expansive and inclusive sequence that provides a reference point for much of his work since the early 1990s. As recently as August 2016, Kinsella has published poems identified as Graphology poems on Mutually Said, the blog he shares with his partner, poet Tracy Ryan. And this leaves us with a final, unresolved question as to whether these recent poems were excluded from a now completed sequence, or whether the Graphology poems will continue to accumulate and evolve into the future.

This book makes a remarkable contribution to the growing tradition of publishing First Nations storytelling from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Paddy Roe, along with Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak, first gave us Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) in 1984 (with a revised edition printed in 1996). This is a beautifully illustrated book that celebrates the storytelling tradition of such elders as Paddy Roe (and Butcher Joe). More recently Stuart Cooke edited and translated George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014) and Terri-Anne White collaborated with Kankawa Nagarra Olive Knight to bring us The Bauhinia Tree (UWAP, 2015). To such literary works we could add the powerful feature film Mad Bastards (Screen Australia, Screen NSW, Screenwest & Bush Turkey Films, 2010) and the richly evocative song lyric & ballad tradition of the Pigram Brothers.

As Stephen Muecke writes in his introduction to Reading the Country: “the plains [and coastal areas of the Kimberley] have been silent for quite a while” (15), as the Traditional Owners have been dispossessed and persecuted. Muecke continues: “This book breaks that silence for a moment: voices speak … It was Paddy Roe initially who had this desire to speak, to tell the story of his country once again” (15). And so in Gularabulu, Muecke continues this collaboration with Paddy Roe, to bring us Indigenous Australian storytelling as it actually sounds.

Muecke writes in his introduction to Gularabulu: “Paddy Roe is celebrated as a storyteller in the great tradition of literature on the Australian continent … [showing us how] Indigenous communities have maintained their ancient heritage in various types of song, performances, and epic narratives” (1). In celebrating Roe as this legendary oral storyteller, Muecke has devised numerous strategies to help the reader "hear" these stories as Roe intended. Muecke writes:

Storytelling is not a dying art … but in traditional Aboriginal societies it had more jobs to do. Knowledge was not extracted from experience and put on the shelf in books, it had to be maintained by telling the stories over and over, often in conjunction with work, like making a boomerang. This is why you will see sounds like "rasping" indicated in the stories here, as Paddy makes an artifact with new tools. Storytelling patterns rise and fall with the rhythmic breathing of the body, and with the to and fro movements of working arms. Listeners chip in with a phrase or two; laughter regularly punctuates the narration, and this pleasure is our reward for following the storyteller as he takes us on his errant pathways. (3).

In transcribing the stories, Muecke has divided the written texts into lines whenever the narrator has paused for breath. The length of this pause is indicated, at each line end, by one dash for each second of pause. Hesitations in mid-line are indicated by commas, with extended vowels, "growls"or breathy expressions indicated by adding more letters to the extent of one per second. Muecke also provides useful guides to pronunciation and glossaries of Language words that have crept into the Aboriginal English. So the first story in Gularabulu begins:

Yeah ------ well these people bin camping in Fisherman Bend him and his

missus you know -

Fisherman Bend in Broome, karnun -- we call-im karnun --- soo, the man used to go Fishing all time -- get food for them, you know, food, lookin’ for tucker - an’ his, his missus know some Malaybloke was in the creek,

Broome Creek --

boat used to lay up there --- so this, his missus used to go there with this Malay bloke - one Malay bloke, oh he’s bin doin’ this for -- over month ---

(24)

Aboriginal English is a glorious linguistic invention-giving testament to dynamic contemporary First Nations cultures. And as a professional linguist, Muecke is very successful in celebrating this, but I cannot understand why he has normalised the spelling. I realise that this makes for slightly easier reading but a phonetic approach to spelling gives far greater clue to intended pronunciation. I do not know the Kimberley region but in the Northern Territory’s Gulf of Carpentaria, where I do have many family and friends, Aboriginal English is one consequence of colonialism. As First Nations were dispossessed, with people from different language groups forced into living with each other, the emergence of a common tongue was inevitable. This Aboriginal English has maintained many of the speech patterns and grammar of Yanyuwa, Gudanji, Garrawa and Mara. It has also preserved much of their vocabulary, especially for describing family relationships and the names of bush tucker and medicine. And a more phonetic approach to spelling gives the reader a more authentic ear to how this language sounds. So when working with storytellers from the Gulf I have adopted the following approach to spelling in a poem asserting the rodeo’s pride:

we bin get up an hab-im gooda one feed us mob so mad rowdy no one bare foot on tis shiny one best of day us mob all cowboy boot, bull hide hat, silky showoff shirt, trouser an chaps wid mad one colour of fringe an fray we bin jumin the mudika an we bin go race rodeo ground mimmi an kukudi bin come too an dey bin singin us mob bullocky dreamin song dey bin learnin us mob for to sing im an everyone deadly safe we like learn for singin us mob song for ceremony, culture, land an law millad mob strong in dat rodeo an in dreamin us proud

This is my approach and I know how much I have to learn from the strategies developed by Muecke. As he shows:

Presenting the stories as narrative art is a way of justifying a writing which tries to imitate the spoken word. When language is read as poetic, it is the form of the language itself, as well as its underlying content, which is important. Just as it would be unjustifiable to rewrite a poet’s work into "correct" English … so it would be unjustifiable to rewrite the words of Paddy Roe’s stories   (9).

Of the nine stories that Roe and Muecke present in Gularabulu there are tales of maban or clevermen and of their magical transformations into various animal forms; there is love, and illicit love, and the payback of jilted lovers; there is hunting prowess and cautionary tales of hunting restrictions; and there are journeys, ghosts and devils. These are stories richly evocative of a world separated from most non-Indigenous Australians. And they give testament to an authoritative and vibrant narrative voice. "Duwayigarra" tells of a young man who elopes with a maban’s wife. The maban man pursues the young lovers eventually sending his power through lightning as particularly climatic payback:

ooh they know lightning everywhere - biig lightning, everywhere strike - these man comin’ ooh still long way from creek --- very hard --- they come they had big load too fish - so this lightning now - rain rain rain rain rain jus’ pouring - now ONE LIGHTNING COME - he strike - he strike right underneath this woman - you know ah - lift-im up - chuck-im outside - pieces and guts, head - oh liver heart everything - aall pieces everywhere -

(54-55)

This dramatic story does raise one concern for the collection, however, in that three of the nine stories involve violence against women as a central motif. Here the murder of women, who are perceived to have been unfaithful to their partners, is condoned as acceptable payback. I don’t want to censor First Nations Culture but maybe some interrogation of these values is called for. Kankawa Nagarra, for instance, has certainly advocated for this examination when she tells the story of her life in The Bauhinia Tree. She highlights how sexist Traditional Law in the Kimberley could be, and while her memories of infanticide and enforced marriage of young girls, or "bride capture with a club", might be contradicted by Liz Conor in her groundbreaking cultural history, Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWAP, 2016), the treatment of women in Roe’s stories does require some scrutiny.

Gularabulu is a spectacular continuation in the tradition of First Nations storytelling from the Kimberley. Roe’s collaboration with Muecke to make these oral narratives accessible in book form while maintaining the exuberance of the storytelling as it actually sounded is groundbreaking. These stories celebrate the continuing vibrancy of First Nations culture after colonisation, empowering Indigenous storytellers, and allowing readers to encounter the proud strength and intellect of First Australians.

Cocky’s Joy is at once an Australian and an international book. Above all it is a book that relishes incongruities and makes playful use of its contexts, materials, whatever comes to hand. In these qualities it continues and extends Michael Farrell’s earlier work. Given that earlier work, it is not unreasonable to come to this collection from an ecopoetic perspective; Farrell has, for instance, edited an issue of the American journal ecopoetics (2006-2009), and environmental concerns, and the interactions of city and country, are elements in the complex, playful mix of his poetry. These are not, however, the sort of poems that attempt to engage in any sense directly with the natural world. There is never a straightforward Romantic “I” in a Farrell poem. But there is value in seeing this book through an ecopoetic lens, especially in its ironic engagement with the ways that Australia has been imagined, especially the myths of the land and the heroic Australian white man (always a white man) dominating the landscape. The many poems which make direct raids on this mythology are among the most memorable of the book and the funniest.

“Bush Christie”, echoing in its title Banjo Paterson’s “Bush Christening” and, of course, Agatha Christie, imagines a murder mystery, complete with genre clichés, acted out among canonical Australian poets (Lawson, Paterson et al.). The resulting incongruities and knowingly hokey rhymes (sloth … both), and the equally knowing historical revision in casting Bennelong as detective (“A too predictable upsetting of fictive / Structure”, 10) make for anarchic fun. A similar meshing of Australiana and apparently unrelated topics, this time literary theory, also occurs in “The Structuralist Cowboy”:

... One cowboy I know liked

to say that the station he worked on was bigger than Deconstruciton. He read Corbière and Marx in the cowboy editions but by the time they reached him cowboy was an extinct language. ...

(35)

This dated and tendentious image of Australia is still worth parodying and destabilising as Farrell does. It is there every day in the collective imagination of TV, in advertising, in the ways that Australians represent themselves in other countries. And it does have very much to do with how we inhabit this land and the relationship between the first Australians and those of us who have come much later. The heroic bloke of the Outback traditionally dominates the land, and it is the machismo that drives that domination which Farrell consistently parodies and undermines.

... A cowboy kiss is the swallowing of

a rabbit and spitting out the skin. Any damage to the skin or cowboy and the action can’t be called a kiss but rather a cowboy choke. ...

(35-36)

These wild colonial boys, Americanised in this poem as their US cousin the cowboy, are as a type vehemently heterosexual, however homosocial. Here too, Farrell bends the stereotype:

 ... Whether they rode in from the

crossroads of Trivia, or from a dry spot in New South Fuckmyarse, was ever discussed. ...

(35)

As the poem wryly remarks towards its end, “Cowboys have a lot of baggage”. A sparer poem that also approaches the legacy of colonialism is “Bringing the 'A'”, which imagines the spread of European culture, agriculture and/or language as the mysterious arrival and spread of the letter A:

The ship came bringing the ‘A’ The land was read as a space for the ‘A’ The ‘A’ damaged the land and fed the people Who brought it In Aboriginal Australia there were no cattle No cloven: therefore no ‘A’

(72)

Yet the movement of the poem is ultimately from imposition of this foreign body onto the natural world to its inextricability:

The ‘A’ was in the bush now, it could never Be caught and sent back, it was Perhaps not an ‘A’ any more but A tree’s deformed horns, or a Rusty piece of rock

(73)

The “A” is also, earlier in the poem, adopted by Aboriginal people as a means of resistance. The absence of any sharp definition of the “A” and the poem’s dreamlike narrative help to blur the distinctions of colonial and indigenous, human and natural. This poem, like some others in the collection (e.g. “The Influence Of Lorca In The Outback”) takes a bad fit and develops what follows from it, ramification on ramification, until the initial juncture can’t be undone. The startling jump of image and phrase, somewhat in the manner of O’Hara and Ashbery, has always been important to Farrell’s style. What appears increasingly in Cocky’s Joy, it seems to this reviewer, is a drive towards equally startling but semi-continuous narrative and a greater tendency to fix on a single junction / disjunction and to trace what follows from it.

All of this works well for Farrell’s characteristic humour, but it does also have serious implications for what this poetry implies, not least regarding the broader non-human world and the combination of cultures that now occupy this land. It is always an interpretive mistake to think that humour is merely humour, but equally it’s difficult to write about comic writing without being deeply unfunny. Nonetheless, what Cocky’s Joy seems to me to do is to reduce to absurdity some still pervasive stereotypes of “the Australian” which have been and are an impediment against a better understanding of this country and its original cultures.

Looking at this very varied collection from one perspective invariably occludes others. I have said little about the book’s witty and affectionate homoerotic poems (“Making Love (To A Man)”, “Spoiled For Choice: 80 Ganymedes”) or its poems of the obsessive. “Seating Arrangment”, for instance, reads to me like the repetitive sort of anxiety dream. It is good to see some of these poems recently picked up in Puncher and Wattman’s Contemporary Australian Poetry (eds. Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave). The placement of the pieces concerned with the myths of the Outback alongside frank, funny, urban poems, the jokey and serious poems of sexuality and familial connections, helps to put these anachronisms in their historical place. And yet, also characteristically of Farrell, they don’t stay there. The old Australiana, the bush, does as much to destabilise the city as vice versa. Cocky’s Joy is, it should go without saying, no manifesto whether ecopoetic or of any other kind. It does though contribute to the steady erosion of obstructive anachronisms, and that, especially for a poet whose gifts are in no small part parodic and comic, is something well worth doing.

In the back of her debut collection, Lisa Brockwell’s author bio states “she has travelled extensively in Europe, North America, and a bit in Asia, for business and for love”. The poems in Earth Girls traverse these spaces – primarily occupying London and Australia – but concern themselves with far more than business and love.

Brockwell begins Earth Girls with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus [trans. Edward Snow], “However much the farmer frets and labours, / he never reaches where the seed / turns into summer. The earth bestows.” Besides the obvious connection to the sonnet form – Brockwell employs eleven – what does the earth "bestow" upon the "girls" in the poems? The opening poem “Seaworthy” begins “She is not a mermaid, nor a siren; / she will never be a goddess. Sitting / on the rocks in her swimming costume”(1), Brockwell begins where land meets sea, the edge between two ecosystems. Mythic images of beauty within water contrast the woman out at the edge, unable to truly belong there. Yet it is “the tug and suck / of the waves” that the woman loves, not the feeling of beauty or belonging. The poem concludes “Now, she sits / on the rocks, thinking, like a man might.” The confidence and entitlement of a male vision isn’t bestowed upon the woman; she takes it herself. Earth Girls begins with not what these girls cannot be, but with what they can be, what they are ready to become.

Poems which dig deeper into the range and depth of Brockwell’s feminist vision are “Chocolate Biscuits” (12-13), “Waiting on Imran Khan” (34-35), and “On Becoming a Housewife for the First Time at the Age of 41” (8). Each poem respectively revolves around the state of girlhood, adolescence, and womanhood. Note how they are not presented in chronological order; Brockwell doesn’t offer a linear transition to womanhood.

In “Chocolate Biscuits” a ten-year-old girl craves confectionary at her godmothers, whose nanna “in years to come, will take to calling me / Two Ton Tessie and wondering out loud / on Christmas Day whether I will ever / find a husband.” While the biscuits are asked for, then devoured with “my face burning with shame” the poem imparts “I am learning something, / later in life I will use it for more / substantial things. I open my mouth.” Brockwell affords distance of voice within “Waiting on Imran Khan”, however, the stakes are higher: not merely the shame over asking for permission to eat chocolate biscuits in a domestic environment, there is the humiliation of serving the Pakistan cricket captain and his teammates in a public space:

I knew they were trouble the moment they walked in. I was eighteen, bookish, I’d not yet learned to build a public face. I was laid open like an oyster on a salted plate. The uniform was no help, nylon trousers cut into my soft waist and thighs, standard issue, there was no bigger size. ...

(“Waiting on Imran Khan”, 34)

The "I" is able to look back, the six-line stanzas and their rhythms allow a storytelling quality, solidifying the distance. The horror of the story retold is counteracted with the comfort in a voice which has now learned to be more than just a pet experimented on by men, “With my greeting (guinea pig // tentative, I kick myself now).” A comment from Khan creates hoots and snarls from the other men around the table; yet, like the learned revelation within “Chocolate Biscuits” we are left with “Yes, / I was walking the floor: earning my own money, slowly / forming the dense quartz of my opinions, polished and patient.”

Brockwell’s formal elasticity is apparent in “On Becoming a Housewife for the First Time at the Age of 41” with Earth Girls first prose poem. The recurrent use of "I" loosens the previous lyric quality, here it provides the poem with energy, propelling it onward containing all the doubts and anxieties found in a stream of consciousness. The poem includes not just the anxieties or troubles of "I", but brings in bigger concerns, " I stand at the sink and cry when the kitchen radio tells me another small child has drowned at sea." By the end of the poem the "I" has been dislodged, all there is to cling on to is the rhythm and searing honesty, “I cannot believe it is up to me to keep this baby alive when I am all heart, all naked flailing heart: no skin, no ribs, just this. Everyone, please, avert your eyes! I cope by doing more exercise.” Within this anxious tension is a voice matured by experience, a voice which while unsure of so much, is so sure of itself.

In the opening eleven poems – which cover sixteen pages – Brockwell employs a stanza break a mere nine times. These nine breaks often follow densely packed stanzas containing nine lines or more. Mathematics lesson over: my point is that the blackness of text on the opening pages hold our gaze – while Brockwell holds her nerve withholding white space – teaching patience, to wait for the white space on the page to arrive, for the poems to open up. That white space is hard-won. When it does arrive, it is through devastating couplets in “Hoa Hakananai’a, the Easter Island statue at the British Museum, speaks” (16-17). Nearly all of Brokwell’s titles work incredibly hard, allowing the first line to immediately run with or against the title, like here “Do you know how much / the banished long to be touched?” The white space we have waited for brings with it a question about waiting.

A number of poems in the collection navigate the relationship between humans and animals. The most striking is “Laika and Oleg” (18-20) about the dog the Soviet Union sent to orbit the earth, and the scientist who selected and trained her. The notion of outer space isn’t new; it has flickered through several poems; “The Ballad of Monday Morning” : “The sky vast and choked / with stars … we could be heading / to the moon” and “Deep space has a bleak / appeal and this is what I wanted”(24-25), or “Palomar” which begins “I stepped through the wormhole and you were there”(10-11).  Outer space is used as the longing for another state or place, or the loss of one, what might have been or what could be. In “Laika and Oleg” though, space is used as a place where, in the name of "progress", terrible acts have happened already. Split into two sections – both dramatic monologues – Brockwell uses Laika’s experiences in the first section to explore the vastness and claustrophobic terror of the unknown; being alone in space is counteracted with the too trusting nature of Laika, waiting, yet ultimately doomed. The poem closes “I want / his smell, his leg to feel my weight against.” In contrast, the second section of the poem takes place 39 years later at a press conference, Oleg expresses remorse – Brockwell uses a direct quote from him in the opening stanza:

The more time passes, the more I’m sorry.

We shouldn’t have done it; we did not learn

enough to justify her death.

("Laika and Oleg", 19)

After that, it is all Brockwell, Oleg is not let off the hook, as she interrogates the guilt and remorse in his voice. We are reminded that: “We all had some choice; the shades of meaning stark, / if we chose to look.”

Brockwell shows herself to be a poet unafraid of tackling the ecological. “Second Exaltation” (56), is the concluding poem in the ekphrasis sequence “Point of View” (49-56). The sequence is an examination of not just how one views artworks, but how one experiences the journey to the exhibition, and the interior of the gallery itself. “Second Exaltation” is worth reproducing in its entirety:

No birds, nothing living in this frame. Only the judge, reserved in blue, backing away, keeping her distance. The sky has no job for us. We look up, she steps back. An indifference that may go on until we stop.

(“Second Exaltation”, 56)

This is Brockwell writing down to the bone, the form simple, the two stanzas mirror-like. There is no flesh to be found on these lines, the message cannot be misconstrued. Ecological concerns are presented and navigated through other means. In “Roofers putting solar panels on the old pub in Mullumbimby” (36), Brockwell hones in on the small, presenting an everyday passing moment and expanding out into something bigger. An international event is presented then paired back, as in “When the water leaves” (47). Where the title in the former offers accessibility in locating the reader, it is the epigram in the latter “after the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan” which does this work. In "Roofers ...", from observing one specific roofer working “each panel a ballerina, / easy across his shoulder”, the underlying action of the installation of renewable energy source is eclipsed by the immediate risk “No one is wearing a harness” (36). The poem closes, or rather opens, with a reaching out, weaving in the Greek myth of Icarus: “The sun is hot, / those big wings of confidence always frighten me” (36). In "When the water leaves", despite being in the immediate aftermath of an incomprehensible natural disaster, Brockwell ominously reminds us that “the earth has not finished with us yet”(47). This is a world where tragedy is always lurking.

Roughly occupying the centre pages of the collection is “Uluru” (29-31). A poem in three sections, the opening two lines in the first section set everything up, “Three days after my middle miscarriage / we went to the desert.” The final section negotiates Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, “Within minutes I knew / a dingo took that baby … This country could not / countenance a woman who did not collapse / on prime time”, and harrowing image intensifies in the final lines: “The sky / illuminated, a map of meaning, the earth / dark and still, slumbering like an exhausted child.” The juxtaposition between the earth and sky play out once more, but here Brockwell asks for how much longer? The following poem, “Echidna” did not feel best placed. After the journey of sorrow through Uluru, it is difficult to follow with a poem beginning “Where is your motorbike? / You look like you should you own one”(32).  Sure, this poem succeeds in isolation; however, the work in building and maintaining the tension which runs through the preceding poem felt too soon alleviated here. That said, the ordering of Earth Girls hits more right notes than not. Particularly in the bookending the collection with “Seaworthy” and “The Verandah” (58-59), we begin with a woman sitting upon the rocks thinking how a man might and leave with the image of a mother and son: “The visitors have gone and the house / beckons; they stay on the verandah, for now.” The waiting within the collection is still apparent; however, Brockwell chooses to leave us with an altered image, not of movement, but of stillness, although the waiting lingers, it appears it will soon be over. Earth Girls teaches the virtue in waiting – while waiting patiently for future work – let us learn what is being said inside these pages and celebrate the arrival of a vital Australian voice.

The poems in this collection are energetic – engaging – and most definitely engrafted, sometimes literally.[1]The poet gives us found poems from Kafka, Dickinson, Joyce; there are remix poems using Shakespeare and Robert Lowell; Solzhenitsyn, Djuna Barnes are the source of erasure  poems. Take the title poem, a remix based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15:

Mary Cresswell

The poems in this collection are energetic – engaging – and most definitely engrafted, sometimes literally.[1]The poet gives us found poems from Kafka, Dickinson, Joyce; there are remix poems using Shakespeare and Robert Lowell; Solzhenitsyn, Djuna Barnes are the source of erasure  poems. Take the title poem, a remix based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15:

Man is conceived upon this sullied stage

and like a seedling grows, but then decreases.

He vaunts his youthful sap in brave conceit,

till wasteful time decays his day to night.

Everything holds but a little moment –

even your perfection cannot stay.

So I’ll make war with time and as he takes you

make love, and with my pen engraft you new.  (19)

Only about half the words appear in the original, but we are definitely in the world of Renaissance English, its language and its carefully engrafted imagery. You can hear both poets talking, and the poem acts as a bridge from 1600 to 2016.

The poem ‘Masque’ gives us quite a different experience. It is an erasure poem using Djuna Barnes’ novel ‘Nightwood’:

Ah,

as if                        abuse  was

happiness                        and    I

striking her

were a game

she raised and dropped                 against my lap

gutted on a dagger                              (23)

We are balancing an entire novel against 24 words here, and I am not sure where to go with it. Quite on its own, the poem is an exercise in projective verse style and can be looked at entirely on these grounds. But where do I put the original now? Or should I stop thinking about it? Is its shape the result of the erasure, or is this quite separate? Should I expect to hear the voice of Djuna Barnes – or has she simply contributed her genes and disappeared? For the purposes of the book here and now, it may not matter – but these are interesting questions.

These questions reflect the disconnected nature of Seminara’s images throughout the book, images which show us the turbulence and disconnectedness around us. Many refer to motherhood: “When fixing the bedclothes / I always remember to pause / by the fighting fish’s tank” (‘Mother’, 33), “When I called for help / your father was unreachable / (and is even more distant now)” (‘Happy Birthday’, 45). Many connect with the ongoing and universal pain of living and our attempts to control it:

I retreat to this land whenever I need healing –

to ingest its molecules in my lungs

its light-waves into my pupils,

black-holed mainlines into the suffering brain.     (52)

The collection is divided into four: Mammoth, Lover, Mother, and Snail. They roughly – very roughly! – indicate buried thoughts and dark possibilities, passion for another, motherhood, and the gradual slowing down of action (though not of feelings) as death comes closer. It’s interesting that the ‘Lover’ section contains more engrafted poems than the others. Is the poet looking to the outside world for support? Or is she telling us that love is always different for each of us, no matter how many poems we write or what past experience our present love draws upon?

Her distance from her sources varies: I suspect catching just the right bit for her own use is as delicate and as crucial as a trapeze artist’s catching the right part of the bar.  After reading this collection, I am looking at engrafted poems in a totally different way, and I can’t begin to guess at the answers I’ll get down the track.

The poet looks outward, then inward. ‘On Reading Bishop’ (Bishop’s ‘Giant Snail’), she says:

Reading Bishop, a distinctive stillness comes.

Like her giant snail I too inch forward

my own amorphous, unguarded

foot absorbing sharp barbs of gravel

avoiding rough spears of grass

as I push, bull-headed, to gain a crack

in God’s sanctuary before sunrise.

Seminara’s foot may be amorphous and unguarded, but her poetry is certainly neither. It’s worth reading on all sorts of levels, both in what she’s saying deliberately and also in what she is demonstrating about different styles of poetry.

Philip Hall's debut collection may well have been called "parcelled in paperbark". The two phrases "parcelled in paperbark / sweetened in coals" appear as a sequential pair in the opening poem "Carpentaria Running the Flag" (7) which forms a prelude to the book. At the outset the reader finds the speaker casting bait and "luring barra / on bloodied lines" and "those caught thrash / on sand before being parcelled in paperbark / and sweetened in coals". In the lush experience of heat, shimmer and "verdancy", the speaker is wrapped (and perhaps also rapt) in place, identified at the poem's end as "Indigenous space", a space where the marks of colonisation and Indigenous interdependence with country are entangled, for example, in "gouged cattle plains / and salt flats".

As the poem unfolds, it seems that not only are the barra "caught", "parcelled" and "sweetened" but the speaker also is caught and parcelled in the complex uncanny lushness of "a back country driven bony / even as floods flush north to the Gulf", and in the "charged sphere" of country, with its "golden beard grass and cathedral mounds". Reference to "crocs" indicates that this is not country to be sentimentalised, and to "cattle", that this so-called remote country (from a coastal cities' perspective) is not pristine "wilderness".

With the word "charged", multiple political and cultural echoes sound in the poem. "Charged" suggests a kind of electric frisson of sacred space, into which intrudes an alien justice system that charges and condemns the Indigenous man or woman or child. The context of Hall's collection is encapsulated in this opening poem, a participatory openness to Indigenous community and country that has aspects of witness, and which recognises that, working in a genre of decolonising ecopoetics, a writer writes "on bloodied lines".

At their best, Hall's poems carry through this complex engagement with community and country, with the book's themes given as section headings "Dwelling", "Praise", and "Home". "Dwelling" opens to "With Cicadas in Nitmiluk National Park" (and the bracketed note "formerly Katherine Gorge"). This is a fine free verse evocation of place where the colonial and the customary intersect in complex interrelationship "in Native Title Law / and Nitmiluk [cicadas] Cruises" (12). The reader is reminded earlier in the poem that the speaker is aware of that this place and season belong in "Jawoyn calendar lore", the poem ends with Nitmiluk "cicadas jazzed-up on sap / and singing / the wet" (12), a reminder, too, of humans "jazzed-up" on other nutrients, stimulants, and excess.

"Palimpsest" shifts the reader geographically to the Budawang Ranges in New South Wales. The poem lays out simply the kinds of overlays – geological, Indigenous, and colonial – that make of the range a palimpsest (13). Taking the reader to the Blue Mountains and Erskine Gorge, "Promised Land" adds complexity to the colonial story with the Warrigals, a late nineteenth-century non-Indigenous walking group adopting an Indigenous name, coming into the Dharug area in the wake of the timbers-getters (14).

Then speaker and reader are returned to the Gulf Country with the understated and effective "Booroloola Blue", a lament for the death of a young Yanyuwa man, which juxtaposes the speaker and companions drinking "chardonnay on ice" as "Yanyuwa youths ran amok / on ganja" (15). The first stanzas describe the "oasis"– constructed by and for what seems the non-Indigenous "we" of the poem – and its contrast with the raucous "build-up to the Wet", at the end of which there is a kind of drug-fuelled excess (chardonnay for some, ganja for others) that comes to a tragic end:

It only ended when [sorry name] leapt on our fence screaming at stars, before lightly climbing a power pole like a cabbage tree palm - an anabashed athleticism electrified

in the fall.            (15)

Set apart as it is, the phrase "in the fall" seems to implicate the whole colonial-biblical tradition, as the youth's fall from the pole is situated in the attempts of the poem's "we" to seed their paradise on another's country.

"Dystopian Empire" stays in Borroloola and describes an intense fight between two old women that no one can break up. The poem raises questions about the voyeurism of tourists and miners, the role of the police, munanga's (whitefullas') ignorance of country, intersecting with alcohol, drugs, and the possibility of a "numinous" mischief, ending poignantly:

Who will tearfully sing him, big business, with millad mob in the dirt, pressing forwards, hoping for peace?        (16)

The reader is reminded that the colonial lie of terra nullius is continually pierced by "women's business" ("In the car park overlooking the grave of John Flynn, Alice Springs", 17). A series of poems discussing the uses and usefulness of indigenous species – black boy, cabbage tree, burrawong palm, she-oak, red cedar – mimic and mock a colonial voice and eye ("colonial heads", 18-22). Logging disturbs and leaves its trace as the speaker nonetheless encounters living country ("Fitzroy Fairway", 23, and "Habitation", 26). The density of language reflects the entwined narratives of place: "with lianas wreathing canopies, / like carpet pythons, festooning the way" (26). Awareness of ecological impacts and resistances recur ("Save Behana Gorge", 27), nuanced by the speaker's ambivalent recognition that in the past nearly 230 years, there have sometimes been multiple displacements, of Indigenous and later farming communities ("Griffin's Farm, Kangaroo Valley", 25). The final poem of "Dwelling" takes the reader into the shared other-than-human and human space of the suburbs ("Suburban Bush Thicknees", 28).

The second section "Praise" has the poet walking as if in Darwin's footsteps ("At Wentworth Falls", 31-32), praising flying foxes "those black / leathered angels seeding / a Daintree, gallantly reclaiming / the Garden" ("This Creation", 33), and celebrating the engineering of the Australian Labyrinth Spider (Corasoides australis) ("Creative Tension", 34). Poems in this section demonstrate Hall's capacity to write also in a spare haiku-like style focusing for example on weather ("Pressure Points", 35-36) or galahs escaping a predatory wedge-tailed eagle ("galahs rising", 39). "Praise" closes with a homily performed by geckos and their "squeaky mischief" ("Homily", 47).

The final section "Home" opens with a pleasing interweaving of more-than-human sexuality and the speaker's relationship with his partner within this broader context:

One day two great coastal taipans blocked our path, they were mating, coiling and uncoiling in ritualised wrestling by necessity brief. We were on the edge of a sugar plantation and whatever we feared rose up into the plovers' plaintive cries. Sometimes aggression when nesting reminds us of what we share. Fruit bat lovers enveloped in wings – hanging – we're a hair's breadth from contentment, a field of sugar in exuberant, humid and suffocating air.

("Bridal Falls", 51)

"Home" is a place of situated narrative, where students gently mock and share knowledge with their teacher ("Borroloola Class", 58), while "Trauma is their epidemic (well one of them)", and the speaker yearns to find solace in "nature" and sometimes does ("Raising the Colours", 59-61).

The genre of walking poem that takes the speaker and reader through country and revisits the challenges and unfolding vistas of the hike is strong in this section, both in the shorter poems "Sparklers" (63) and "Toasting Marshmallows" (64) and the longer "Learning on the Line" (65-70). This, the book's penultimate poem, successfully conveys the movement of the long hike through country as a pedagogic interrelationship between students and teacher, with an irony that leaves us with the group preparing "a billy of tea" while forecasting "the luxury of their next fast-food" (70). The final poem "Concourse" (71-73) has the poet setting out with a group led by Malbu taking "them young ones bush". On route the lyric I enters the poem "I know they want the music changed / as Malbu growls you mob, calm down there / this blackfulla William Barton is didjin' / you mob listen there" and later "I lean / into Country". The narrative of the poem is situated in the dialogue between the young ones, Malbu and the reflective "I" of the speaker, who has to put aside his "eco spiel" and come to "the rivers' confluence" – "look here mista, twobula river runnin' one" – so that the poem and the book conclude with the evocation of "silt-laden language" (73).

While there are places I felt some poems in sweetened in coals could have been sharpened with editing, the collection is strong and significant. Hall's poetics situates itself in an inter-cultural story-building for community and country. He offers an ecologically-tuned white perspective but one few whitefullas share in practice: a way of seeing and writing that opens to being schooled not only by place but more particularly by the Indigenous communities, their elders and young ones, for whom place is always country. This is principled, explorative, lyric poetry that contributes to a transcultural ecological poetics. It is two years now since the publication of sweetened in coals. I look forward to Hall's next collection.