In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot explores how Rilke and Mallarmé, two of the architects of modern poetry, each ‘turn…towards death as the origin of poetic possibility.’ For Blanchot, poetry’s—in fact, art in general’s—unique relationship to death rests on its capacity to voice a fundamental ambiguity: on the one hand, death engenders change and thus form, particularity, and, with regard to the subject, the prospect of total selfhood, of understanding, of truth; on the other hand, the subject who dies cannot experience this death, an inability that calls totality of any kind into question. The ‘original experience’ that compels and threatens art, Blanchot argues, is that of death as open-ended, unpossessed, impossible, at the same time as it is ‘the extreme of power’ and the ultimate closure. Recognising this paradox sheds new light on poetry’s blurring of affirmation and negation, unknowing and knowing, surrender and control.

everything strapped down

and     escaping…

(28)

This couplet from ‘Freycinet Caravan Park’ in Zenobia Frost’s sophomore collection exemplifies the book’s study of the dynamics of change as lived, felt. Moreover, it points to the capacity of poetic language, if rigorous enough, as it is here, to involve itself in and evoke such dynamics in real time. What remains beyond the end, Frost asks—whether the terminal structure is a house, a self-image, a partnership, a life—and who remains to name it?

A fitting beginning, then, would be to consider that Frost stages the final, and perhaps most regenerative, poem in the book, ‘Peripheral Drift,’ on grounds of death: ‘Turns out,’ declares the speaker, ‘you can still pash in a graveyard / at 28’. Divided into two long, roughly equal stanzas, the poem depicts queer lovers unsure whether to hold hands on a late-night ‘skeptic tour’ in the wake of the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, the plebiscite on gay marriage in which ‘this country tallied its paper YESes’. Of course, the affirmation that such a mandate represents also implies the (never final) overcoming of resistance, even hatred—people ‘yell[ing] / slurs from a car…’ What impresses here is how Frost braids these complexities, Blanchot’s ‘primordial Yes and No,’ into subtle influence while keeping the lens on the sensuous portrait of the lovers: ‘Her hands / smell of headstone moss…’.

The title of the book’s first section, ‘Schrödinger’s Roommate,’ calls to mind the famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics whereby, under certain conditions, a cat sealed in a box could be said to be simultaneously alive and dead—strapped down, escaping. It is a clever metaphor to describe the tenant’s experience, central to the section, as migratory, governed by efforts to cultivate home in temporary, often derelict spaces. In her ‘Blueprint’ and ‘Distractions at Rental Inspections’ series, Frost personifies features of properties to the extent that these poems become a kind of collective conceit—place, like the self, both object and subject, cared for and neglected: ‘the Hills Hoist a skeletal rotunda’; ‘the corpse of a sofa’; ‘the mattresses have bred since my last visit’; ‘orphaned dressers’; ‘the walls don’t meet - / gap-toothed / a transom punched into cornice.’ Against this ruinous backdrop, between reality TV shows and Census night and references to Pompeii and the Ottoman Empire, sites of different orders of collapse, the subject and voice of these poems (de/re)constructs herself.

To call After the Demolition a coming-of-age narrative would be too linear, but it is important to emphasise the book’s cohesion, its meticulous sense of sequence, development, and echo. Representative of Frost’s facility for detail at other levels, these global cadences of craft are often missing from poetry collections. Consider a moving illustration. In ‘Salvage,’ the speaker visits her dying father in hospital: his ‘eye / flexes in the socket of a gelding skull…’ (33). Two pages later, in ‘Grief,’ the speaker asks:

When is a psychic stain remover the best when someone dies in-house?

I use vinegar

to make a room gleam like light of the back of a horse.

(35)

For its evocativeness, its rightness, this is an exquisite metaphor. Given their relation to the earlier poem, however, the lines acquire a magical quality: they bring back what is gone, but as gone, as what Blanchot might call a present absence, evanescent, strapped down and escaping. It makes sense, then, that we hear another echo in ‘The Tophouse,’ towards the end of the collection. One of the book’s strongest standalone poems and most vital to its personal arc, ‘The Tophouse’ finds the speaker abandoned by her boyfriend somewhere in the United States in his family’s ‘honey-warm A-frame’. Betrayed in extraordinary fashion, ‘alone with the woods,’ the speaker remarks: ‘Some men are just gutless. I am a horse / with its leg bent back.’

Salt and Bone, Frost’s first book, was auspicious in part for its finely wrought imagery and sonic patterning: ‘On borewormed verandah / acquaintances dance, / a tableaux in the act of falling.’ One of the pleasures of After the Demolition lies, similarly, in Frost’s combining of ‘high’ and ‘low’ registers with clarity, humour, and verve. In these poems, we find a lover resembling Venus and an image on Grecian urn while ‘fangin a durry in Raybans’; biting aloe in ‘Succulent’ provokes ‘the ooze of mucilage’; one step in ‘Blood Spells’ is to ‘boil a Diva cup to offer the goddess’;  a coastal storm brings ‘static / pressed into the caravan / like melamine cups / pressed into compartments’. From diction up, Frost attends to her subject matter the way a hand might a log thrown from a fire—in fitful, shifting analyses. Immediately after the autobiographical pathos of ‘Salvage’ comes ‘Suriago del Sur,’ a dialogue-driven synopsis of an X-Files episode in which Scully and Mulder examine a dead body, covered in salt, on a ship:

Mulder licks his finger, brushes it along the body’s shoulder, tastes the crystals. ‘Mm,’ he says. ‘Either way, You agree he died by assault at sea?’

(34)

This abiding specificity—of image, of diction, of rhythmic construction, of tonal interplay, of lineation patterns—works to elicit nostalgia, contemporaneity, and a glint of the uncanny in rival measures. Clifton Fadiman once defined ‘a poet in the original sense’ as ‘a coiner of wonderful new language’; Frost is one of a few young Australian poets whose work embodies that definition, word by word, line by line.

'What I want,’ confesses the speaker in ‘Self-Portrait 27’, 'is to tug at the thread where silence flared up’. Another encapsulation of the paradox of voicing death, this line also highlights the current of lyric interiority and beauty that courses through the book. Frost’s gift for ironic insouciance, moreover, throws such beauty into starker relief, resisting—or playing with— sentimentality. The book’s opening poem, ‘Before and Now,’ ends with the command to ‘sing a little more / sing’, an ostensibly surprising homage to the lyric’s musical, vatic pretensions. But these, for all their wit and range, are poems that seek a kind of particularised personal sacred, what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘the unmediated vision’. William Blake famously gazed at wood knots until they frightened him; the figures in ‘Jazz Domestic’  ‘wait in butter / sunset wet with sunken basement / now exulted’; I’m not a natural swimmer’, admits the speaker in ‘Bathers’, ‘but neither is the platypus: / part land locked, part limitless’. Late in ‘The Tophouse’, as the structures of toxic masculinity built in After the Demolition (and, for that matter, in Salt and Bone) begin to fall, it strikes the speaker that ‘Truth is a tender fossil. / And everything is exodus enough in sunlight’.

Almost by definition, poetry collections accentuate change. Beginnings and endings abound, the parts subsumed by the whole and yet not constitutive of it in the same way that, for example, the chapters of a novel ordinarily compose the narrative. For Blanchot, this difference rests upon the fact that poetry is further from the language of discourse than is prose fiction; that poetry is, in truth, inimical to discursive knowledge: ‘the questioning at the heart of poetry can never find an end’. Central to this unease, of course, is the poem’s facility for voicing the ambiguity of death and therefore casting doubt over the possibility of both foundation and conclusion. In After the Demolition, winner of the 2020 Wesley Michael Wright Prize and shortlisted for the 2020 Kenneth Slessor Prize, Zenobia Frost has shown that such groundlessness need not be pessimistic. Rather, it is the essence of life as it’s lived: in permanent flux, strapped down and escaping. To read the best of Frost’s poems is to inhabit this movement in microcosm—and, perhaps, to feel the budding of acceptance, the complex of celebration.

Ella Jeffery’s debut poetry collection Dead Bolt is a wandering contemplation of home and the accompanying feelings of belonging or alienation. While the collection is divided into four parts, the poems seem arbitrarily grouped as the overall themes of travel, tense love, and language are shared across the sections. The poems vary greatly in form and mode as they move through conversations with or about literary and pop culture figures, ekphrastic responses to art, and rumination on the environmental role of the humble spider. The central concern that drives the collection, though, is the speakers’ sense of themselves as (un)settled, (un)loved, (un)safe.

The opening poem “In the former French Concession” immediately launches the reader into Jeffery’s sensual style, describing fish “big as tables, headless fish, fish curved and smooth as boat hulls” (11) which punctuate the Shanghai streets. The imagery, like in many of the poems set in Shanghai, evoke pungent smells and vibrant sights that are both enticing and novel to the speaker. At times the novelty of Shanghai slips into a familiar Australian exoticism which uses the aura of a foreign city as a backdrop to a protagonist’s self-discovery. For example, “scaffolding” describes Shanghai as hazy or unknowable:

shang  hai          means up river                    or up from the sea

or above sea                      level

(39)

Later the speaker passes her neighbour’s house under renovation before “all day I skim / from place to place” (40), summarising that

shang  hai          is                             a dream

I had I left

some things        there I might

not         go back                 for them

(41)

Shanghai and its people and culture are minimised in the prioritisation of the speaker’s individual narrative.

The image of the renovated building, hollowed out, propped up by bamboo scaffolding, and infested with rats or ferrets is a recurring symbol in Dead Bolt to represent the speaker’s discomfort with her life. She feels unsettled, bouncing between moments of love and connection and moments of alienation and uncertainty. Amongst the visceral senses of sight, smell, touch, the speaker struggles with language. In “scaffolding” she remarks “I am                        not fluent” and “I have / no sense of tense” (39). In a way, the symbolic dead bolt is language, which keeps the speaker locked away from those around her.

in the same way that sitting alone in a busy park where everyone speaks a language you cannot understand is to touch the edge of silence and feel it seal perfectly around you.

(“Quotient”, 19)

This focus on language is telling, then, when it frequently overburdens the imagery, as though overcompensating for misunderstanding with metaphor. In “Monopoly” Jeffery cleverly captures the exhaustion and frail instability of house renting but the final metaphor “you were a thimble and I was a wheelbarrow” is undercut by half a dozen similes beforehand including “walls / like tiny gold animals”, “shirts hanging like colourful ghosts”, and the couple collecting furniture “like mafia bosses” (97). The desire to impress upon the reader a beautiful image becomes belaboured and creates sentences like potholes; “I love the way / rain’s called showers, which implies comfort” (“Meteorology”, 43). Too often the poetry in Dead Bolt offers generic conclusions or reaches for a forced, overwrought poetic voice.

Jeffery shines most in her witty poems like “Scott Cam helps me fix a few things around the house” or “R.S.V.P.” where the speaker challenges Gertrude Stein’s love of company like a true introvert. “Ways to suffer” is a particularly powerful piece about people’s penchant for making the wrong decision, turning the wrong corner, or being disappointed.

On a yacht, drinking bellinis in a yellow robe. By torchlight, in the garden, looking for your keys. By overstaying your welcome. By moving house in January. At night or in the day. Either will work.

(55)

It’s a delicate poem that could easily read as flippant but Jeffery has a fine control of the underlying forces in domestic scenes, the black humour thrown against joy. In the final lines she again centres the speaker in uncertainty but with the harsh reality of her own agency:

Like your father who checks every lock twice and twice again. Like your mother who helps him out of love and pity. Like you, watching them or turning away.

(56)

The tension in that moment, where the speaker can choose to turn towards imperfect love or away to the unknown, tremors throughout the collection. In another poem “Backyard occult”, Jeffery again balances pithiness with nonchalant flair when exploring the weight of life choices.

The problem is not how to decipher an omen, it’s how to choose one. Example: you see two crows on a wire, then a man who sneezes brutally on the footpath behind you. … And all night you ask yourself: which is it?

(67)

It’s in this self-awareness of meaning-making that Jeffery’s funny and fresh, original voice is most effective. The paradox of how Jeffery’s uncertain speakers in Dead Bolt ring with recognition reveals the clarity of her poetic vision and is promising for future work.

It is an interesting endeavour to destabilise early Australian literary history through an interrogation of colonial texts not usually read for their poetics but for their cultural signification.

In this approach, texts like ‘notorious bushranger’ Ned Kelly’s The Jerilderie Letter and ‘Indigenous traveller’ Bennelong’s ‘Letter to Mr Phillips, Lord Sydney’s Steward’ exist at the boundaries of Australian poetry. But so does the text of another Indigenous writer that of Gladys Gilligan’s ‘The Settlement’ which A.O. Neville, Protector of Aborigines, requested she compose. Yet at the edges of Australian poetry also exists ‘an extraordinary text’ by the Chinese gold-miner Jong Ah Sing that represents ‘outsider writing’ long before the notion figured in the Australian literary imaginary both because the term did not yet exist in the nineteenth century and because ‘arguably there was no inside in Australian letters at this time’. And there are diaries by settler women, drover texts on trees and water tanks, drawings, etc. Nor in this assemblage of texts do documents by Charles Harper, Dorothea Mackellar, and Christopher Brennan go astray.

Through the analysis of punctuation and other textual elements, and paying homage to Philip Mead’s work in Networked Language (2008), poet-critic Michael Farrell engenders new possibilities of interpretation through the increasingly important notion of unsettlement. As Farrell argues:

Australian literature ... is not and never was, settled. From its beginning it was being made and remade by writers of different cultures, whether Indigenous, Chinese, convict Irish, or working or middle-class English settlers. These writers invented new material practices of lettering style, syntax, and punctuation usage, as well as new and networked affects, tones and ironies. (195)

The implication is that it is writing that has given settled readings of Australian literary history and it is writing that can unsettle those readings.

Farrell invites us to treat his readings as the outcome of his own reading engagement—an unsettled poetics of reading perhaps. Yet his is also a project of enlargement since he desires to open up what Australian writing can be. At a purely scholarly level, he wishes to increase interest in the colonial era, break the city-bush dyad, render Indigenous writing present from the beginning of European colonisation and settlement, open up the study of canonical writers such as Dorothea Mackellar or Christopher Brennan, contribute to the history of Australian visual poetics, and suggest new ways of engaging with texts whose meaning seems already known.

Given Australian literature’s late arrival on the world literary landscape, the boldness of Farrell’s project of unsettlement is to advocate for the experimental early in Australian literary history. While his assemblage ‘of exemplary unsettled texts from what might be called the long colonial era’ could well have appeared less than literary when composed, Farrell argues that they also seem ‘to supply the deficiency of Australian literature in providing’ a possible ‘experimental poetics, pre-empting the modern, conventionally described as beginning with Kenneth Slessor in the 1930s, or a little later with the fictional poet Ern Malley in 1943’ (4). The reality of settlement itself engenders this alternative poetics through a need to invent words to describe the different landscape, fauna, and flora. But so do the ‘new literacies’ of convicts and little-educated British settlers. In this mix also exist other settlers and sojourners such as the Chinese learning to write in English. And ‘the beginning of writing in English by Indigenous people' also contributes to this experimentalism (4). The conclusion is that ‘new forms and new uses of forms were inevitable’ (4).

The point throughout is whether Farrell unsettles inherited significations to open up meanings. Through experimental textual investigations, he demonstrates how others can seek the interstices of culture and literature to enrich Australian literary and cultural significations.

Nganajungu Yagu by Wajarri, Badimaya and Southern Yamiji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and False Claims of Colonial Thieves, a collaboration between Papertalk Green and white settler poet John Kinsella, are important works which expand the way poetry as activism can be formed and read in this continent of many First Nations. The activism these works embody is at once open, collaborative, passionate and compassionate. I am engaging with these works as a white settler scholar aware that this limits my capacity to respond adequately to Papertalk Green’s work or with the nuance a First Nations’ reviewer might bring. In this review, I focus not so much on an ecocritical perspective, as if such could stand alone, but on the flow of narrative energy and witness, and the way poets living in this continent might read the impacts of white religion on Country.

Nganajungu Yagu means ‘my mother’ in Wajarri language (65). In 1978 and 1979, Papertalk Green left home to attend senior high school in the state capital, where she lived in ‘an Aboriginal girls’ hostel’ in Bentley, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia (xi). While she was away at school, her mother wrote letters to her; Nganajungu Yagu is inspired by and responds to those letters (xi). The poems use Badimaya, Wajarri and English languages, and occasionally words from Aboriginal English. The letters from her mother sustained Papertalk Green and helped keep her connected to Country, family and community; she carried them with her in a ‘red journey suitcase’ (‘RJS’) which she replaced over the years, and which she also refers to as a ‘red coolamon’, a First Nations vessel for carrying infants and food (1-2, 6). For Papertalk Green, the use of her Badimaya and Wajarri languages honours her ancestors (xi). In the poems, repetition gives the use of First Nations languages an incantational quality (for example, in ‘Letter on 28 June 1979’, 12-13).

Many of the poems are headed by excerpts from her mother’s letters. Each of her responses to these letters begins ‘Nganajungu Yagu’ and speaks to the complexities of her mother’s situation, especially the contingencies of work, poverty and housing in a system where First Nations’ labour was unpaid or underpaid, and providing for a family was frequently a struggle. ‘Papertalk’ was a word used (possibly coined by colonials) to refer to First Nation people sent with news from one community to another (3). Papertalk Green takes this name as a badge of honour and sees herself as a messenger for ancestors and descendants (3). Her work is also secondarily a message to settler Australians, a truth-telling exercise about the realities of First Nations’ lives under the racist colonial policies of Western Australian governments from the nineteenth century, and their ongoing effects across generations. Primarily, Nganajungu Yagu is written in remembrance, enacting gratitude, compassion, understanding and love for her family, especially her mother but also her father, embedding this re-member-ing in the contexts of Country and community (18-19).

Using a methodology that parallels Natalie Harkin’s ‘archival poetics’, Papertalk Green accessed her family’s ‘Native Welfare’ files, to fill in the background to her parents’ lives.[i] These were Government records formerly kept on all First Nations people in Western Australia. Interspersed with her replies to ‘Nganajungu Yagu’ are works of resistance and protest, such as the sequence ‘Cultural Genocide’, which answers the questions set for the ‘Exemption Certificate’, a document First Nations people could apply for officially renouncing their Aboriginality and Community connections in order to live with the privileges of white settler society. Formerly, the Exemption Certificate allowed Western Australian First Nations people to be exempt from the Aborigines Act 1905 (WA) which legislated for ‘protection, control and segregation of Aboriginal people’.[ii] The 1905 Act was in force until 1964, when it was superseded by the Native Welfare Act 1963 in force until 1972.[iii] For Papertalk Green, despite the oversurveillance of First Nations' lives in this period – and it could be argued into the present – and despite attempts to dissolve First Nations connections to Culture, Community and Country, she answers: ‘No dissolving and disappearing for everyone.’ (39). Like many contemporary First Nations’ poets, Papertalk Green claims a space of survival beyond colonialist policies of assimilation: ‘We write about deep Aboriginal culture love / and that shatters their assimilation into pieces’ (‘Walgajunmanha All Time’, 15). As Jeanine Leane suggests in ‘Whitefellas’ when she says ‘Truth is, Australia doesn’t work / without Aborigines! This country would be broke / without Blackfellas’, the contemporary nation of Australia has relied and continues to rely on First Nations peoples for its survival; Papertalk Green answers the invader: ‘Our people made sure you could survive on our land’.[iv]

A subtheme in Nganajungu Yagu is the impact of Christianity, as a colonial enterprise. Papertalk Green wonders in ‘Birthday Present’ why she is gifted an illustrated Bible, inscribed for her first birthday. She writes:

I still have what is left that Bible with half pages missing out of its 1300 The pages with the paintings remain I only keep this book because a gift

(22)

Later, reflecting on the trauma her mother endured, surviving as she did the loss of ‘five babies in a seven-year period’ and later her eldest son, and her mother’s strength and courage, Papertalk Green writes to her late mother, ‘I now understand why you and Dad gave me a Bible for my first birthday. A present never carried in RJS.’ (51).

The Bible is an ambiguous gift – because the Bible was part of the colonial cargo that accompanied the arrival of Christianity in Western Australia. In Nganajungu Yagu the Spanish Benedictine Mission at New Norcia is a key site of encounter with Christianity for Papertalk Green’s immediate family. Her father was placed there as a six year old, ‘300 km south of where his family lived’ (18). Narrating an incident when her father refused to let a nun give her piano lessons in Mullewa, she writes: ‘I reckon he suffered the same cruelty in the kids’ prison at the hands of the New Norcia religious assholes as did all the other “inmates”’ (18).

Witness to the impact of colonial religion appears in False Claims of Colonial Thieves in a section focused on the legacy of English settler architect priest John Cyril Hawes (1876–1956). Hawes designed and built a church completed in 1927 in Mullewa; his major work was the cathedral in Geraldton completed in 1938.[v] Papertalk Green and Kinsella write about Hawes’ colonial church-building, both in Mullewa and Geraldton (‘"Hawes" – God’s Intruder’, False Claims of Colonial Thieves, 34–50).  Each is critical of the impact of Christianity, the way it both ignored and wrote over the Cultures of First Nations in the region and their deep engagement with the sacred in Country, but the way the two poets depict this is different. Papertalk Green writes of the proximity of the church building in Mullewa as a site of play, but its gargoyles frightened her, and then a bit later in the same poem:

The big church in Geraldton on the sand hill Was not part of my world in Mullewa Our SDA church sat staunchly On Maitland Road waiting for its family We got bags of Weet-bix, oranges, and apples Saved us from really starving so That’s something I guess

(‘Hawes’ – God’s Intruder, 41)

The poem continues ‘But that big church in Geraldton / What a poser standing there like a temple’ ('"Hawes" – God’s Intruder’, 41). When she moves to Geraldton, ‘the Big Church was in my face’, she writes ('"Hawes" – God’s Intruder’, 42). The poet is sickened to learn that ‘The space it so grandly took over / Was once a traditional campsite’, from which First Nation people were moved to places like the infamous ‘Moore River Native Mission’ (‘"Hawes" – God’s Intruder’, 42). For Papertalk Green, ‘social engineering’ and colonial ‘land grab[s]’ went hand in hand (‘"Hawes" – God’s Intruder’, 42). Later in their collection, in ‘Cathedral Avenue’ Kinsella, relocates sacred space: ‘What is held in the cathedral / of salmon gums and wandoo?’ (110).

False Claims of Colonial Thieves is an exercise of truthful, compassionate collaboration which builds organically. Rather than alternating voices as might have occurred if one poem by Kinsella followed by one by Papertalk Green had been printed in sequence back and forth, there are sometimes blocks of poems by one or the other author and the interplay of voices is rendered more subtle. But the perspectives remain different, and the collection works well to demonstrate that First Nations’ connection to Country and an ecologically-informed settler love for place come from shared but incommensurable histories. While there are points of connection, the sovereignty of First Nations is founded in Country, and this as Kinsella has said, too, is the basis for ecological action on Country. In her review of this collection, Timmah Ball writes: ‘A major strength of the collection is its opportunity to see the colonised and colonisers’ voices in parallel, fighting for the same cause in different ways, both determined to see justice, yet never shying away from the enormous gulf that exists between them.’[vi] This is a collection to read and re-read for the poetry, the practice of mutual respect and the honesty around the intercultural space that it enacts.

In Nganajungu Yagu language, family, ancestry, and Country intersect and the poems work to set up spaces of language and narrative that mimic and unsettle colonial language and bureaucracy, resisting the violence of invasion by making something else through maternal connection celebrated and claimed in compassion and love. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s acclaimed work embeds itself in Country and the relations of Country, with truth and kindness. The spaces on the page, the juxtapositions, the edges of text, the uses of punctuation and capitalisation, the prose, the use of text box and archival material, give shape to this truth-telling, as language and story together witness to a compassion that has the capacity to change worlds.

So what is a quad? The OED and the Urban Dictionary together give us twenty definitions, but none of them applies to Chris Mansell’s collection. Here is what she says: 'Fifteen characters, eight single-spaced lines, interlinked four times = one quad poem. Four hundred and eighty characters exactly.' (106)

As you can see, these visual poems are in a font with no proportional spacing and include 'portmanteau interiors which can be sound-mined for red to produce new elemental poems which can be read (aloud) separately' (106).  More of this later, but this poem on page 21, ‘[on writing poems]', is representative of the style throughout the book. There doesn’t seem to be a canonical definition of vispo, especially in contrast with concrete poetry, and this particular book lends itself to separating the two aspects. I’ll start with the po alone, which I admit means trying to separate cognitive meaning from visual impression – but this seems to work best at the moment.

The poetry roams comfortably over a wonderfully broad range of topics: deserts and war, politics, love, poetic creation, history, nature, moments in the depths of the psyche. A poem titled ‘[do not apologise]’ begins: 'never apologise / your inner amer / ican reserves g / rief plain cont / ortions of cons /istencies never / manifest plan i / ts ritual exe' (74), and ends despairingly with 'we shall do and / do again'. The poem ‘[after error]’ is a most elegant domestic: 'smother up take / a sofaful of mi / stake an armada / of already done / a sack of canno / t take back rem / inding you ever / and ever more d / amned than before / re take highest / ground and lowe /st ebb' (59). A tirade on politics, ‘[losing political will]’, begins with 'political party / model for noone / no tiddly tidal / game' and ends: 'fallen and dead / more often than / got shitzenship / fractured right / s duties onus a / dill a minute a / slouch and bump / meanwhile power // shops your hear / t you lose your / ear for truth i / s dare no thing / cozy is all con / serving all con / verse at stunts / mumble shrug on' (56). ‘[On the square’]  thumbs its nose at the sacred concept of measuring things: 'square squantum / a bit chunked o / ff equal and cr / isp and even co / ol as angle tha / t sharp interst / itial cornerdom / of block standb // y cube the coun / t one and two m / ore exactly one / than a circle s / saying naught sq / uare sits so ev / en before its l / eft or right th' (91).

Most of the four-poem groups taper off somehow at the end, but we’re left unsure as to why: are they complete-as-incomplete? or are they pointing the way to a future that’s uncertain and may or may not be up to us to complete? Even in a stripped-down version, these poems aren’t easy to read, or at least not easy to read quickly, and I’m assuming this is Mansell’s intention. Most of us bob around all day in a bottomless pool of language, and it’s easy to get into the meaning without bothering with the form. Poems like these are a confrontation with language, forcing us to slow down and take a careful look at where we are swimming and how we got there. Some of cummings’ / Cummings’ poems – for example, ‘l(a’ and ‘dim/i/nu/tiv’ – make the same point, I think.

This, of course, gets us into the vis side of things. For starters, Mansell makes a great point of her use of the Prestige Elite typeface for these poems. It’s certainly the case that she needs non-proportional spacing or the whole idea wouldn’t work, but why this one, instead of, say, Courier, which has the advantage of being MS-Word-friendly as well? Maybe she is being ironic, playing off the classy-sounding ‘Prestige Elite’ name against the historical fact that this typeface was bog standard in IBM typewriters from the 1950s until PCs took over the world.

I have difficulty seeing how the red sections should be handled. Do they only make sense when read aloud, as the author specifies in her afterword? In that case, shouldn’t we be talking about a three-dimensional vis-aud-po? Sometimes the red does seem to reproduce a sound, almost turning a slant rhyme into a visual equivalent of a descant. I suspect, though, that without hearing a performance I will miss out on a major part of the poems’ impact.

Look at this poem, ‘[australian pasts]’, one of several poems of place, dragging in politics and bringing along its own musical instruments.

Reading this, I start getting frivolous ideas about the poet as architect and the quads as building blocks – rough-hewn sandstone, of course, as befits the 'australian d / reams flatlinin / g to futures lo / st beyond imagi / ning' (65). So then the red letters make sense as irregular crystals reflecting light in their own way from the surface of a formal structure. Or maybe not: the quads are certainly a stimulating read and a fascinating poetic invention.

It is human / so human / to leave.

‘In Order to Return’, Omar Sakr, The Lost Arabs

The first two parts of Yumna Kassab’s House of Youssef are made up of very short sections, some not much longer than a page. In an interview with Sunil Badami, Kassab suggests her habit of taking photos of ‘everyday things’ in and around Parramatta has perhaps filtered through to her writing, to create this ‘snapshot’ form.[i] Each chapter feels tightly framed, often focused on an individual character — a single mother looking for a house to rent; a man interviewing suitors for his daughter’s hand — and the writing too is careful and economical. Action (marriages collapsing; sons entering prison) unfolds beyond the frame of the page, alluded to or mentioned in passing. ‘Births, Deaths, Marriages’, for example, opens like this: ‘The day after he killed his wife, Mohamed goes to visit his cousin’ (84).

By the end of these opening two parts, we have been introduced to several dozen characters. In musical terms, we might think of this multiplication of voices as almost orchestral; a full range of timbres and tones that, heard in quick succession, create a polyphonic texture. The second two parts, in contrast, each feature an individual voice speaking at length, and these might be thought of as solo performances. In ‘Darkness, Speak’ a mother tenderly addresses her daughter, and in ‘Homing’ an old man reflects on his life, still ‘lost in the memory of another land’ (193).

Though this is a variegated portrait, Kassab’s characters are united by the fact they all form part of the Lebanese diaspora, all live in Western Sydney, and all grapple with questions of belonging and identity. Kassab’s language evokes this distinctive setting: she incorporates Australian vernacular (‘his bomb of a car had copped it’) as well as capturing the cadences of first-generation migrant voices:

This country is full of work. People work many hours of the day and when they don’t work, they talk about work…. Yes, work is good. It keeps the heart strong but you work so you can buy the good things for your family. There is no need to grab money. The things people do today for money! They act as if they are without soul. (201)

In an Author’s note, we are told that in Arabic, parents are often referred to by the name of their eldest male child. Um Abdullah, for example, means ‘mother of Abdullah’. So before the (non-Arabic-speaking) reader even enters the book, Kassab re-orients us. Each individual’s name (and by implication, each individual) does not stand alone, but is defined relationally. Some names recur, yet are attached to different characters. A name like ‘Amanda’ stands out here, and association with such a name is often a source of disgrace. There is pressure to anglicise names: ‘His mother told him to change his name on his CV to Kurtis or Kyle’ (104), and resistance to this pressure: ‘this is my name, I will keep it’ (104). Mayada resolves to stop going by her name: ‘That was once me but no more, no more Mayada for me’ (171), and her family, ashamed at how ‘feral’ and ‘wild’ she has become, despairs that she ‘did not look after her name’ (180).

Taken collectively, the above practices and attitudes attached to naming signal a deeper set of beliefs. For the first-generation migrants that populate Kassab’s stories, tradition, honour and respect are paramount. To dishonour one’s name is tantamount to a severing from one’s culture, one’s family, and one’s origins. Some mentally ill characters literally forget their own names (‘She went delirious mad. Cuckoo. Over the edge, no going back. Mayada did not even know her own name’, 166), the ultimate source of shame.

Tensions are ever-present, not only between white Australian culture and Lebanese Muslim culture, but between the first and second generations of Lebanese migrants. Kassab herself grew up in Sydney, and yet she inhabits the psyches of older migrants convincingly. She depicts the older generation as at times vicious (refusing to meet her own grand-daughter, one character hisses: ‘I don’t care if you’ve had some half-breed child’, 57) but also deeply vulnerable. The narrator of ‘Homing’ confides that ‘sometimes all I want in this life is for my children to listen without laughing’ (203). He reveals a terrible loneliness, identifying with the boat-people in the news who his own sons scorn, concluding ‘my world will always be strange to them’ (210). The younger generation, conversely, can be brash but we also feel for their predicament. They must straddle two worlds, stifled by the over-protectiveness of their parents, but facing hostility and Islamophobia in the schoolyard, in the workplace, and in wider society. It is testament to Kassab’s skill as a writer that we are never made to side with anyone. At times her writing has a fable-like quality, yet she resists any attempt to moralise.

In Australia, the term ‘culture clash’ gets thrown about. It suggests something overt, but in Kassab’s depiction, cultural tensions and divides are often more internalised and insidious. The younger generation must be vigilant of the unspoken rules of two worlds, and this can require not just compromise, but deception. Ayesha must live a ‘double life’: she skips her exams to go to the beach, carrying her ‘invisible audience’ with her, who ‘watch, assess, correct and reprimand her’ (94). The same object can have starkly different meaning according to its context, and the younger generation are hyper-sensitive to this, too. The hijab, for instance, is an object of both devotion and suspicion. Kassab hints at this double reality through moments of dramatic irony, which can make the (white Australian) reader feel implicated: ‘I know she does not touch the drink but she goes out to the pub with her white friends’ (258). The older generation, meanwhile, are desperate to keep their culture and language alive, but simultaneously want their children to fit in. Sumaya, for example, lacks money but still buys her son brand-new things so ‘he would not be different from the other children’ (116). All, ultimately, are quite tragic figures. The younger generation must bear the weight of familial expectation, but the older ones live in fear of being ‘ruined’ by their children’s choices.

At its heart, The House of Youssef is about home. The bulk of the stories take place in domestic settings (over the kitchen sink; in a living room). But ironically, most of the characters, born here or not, feel un-homed. The opening image of ‘The House of Youssef’ is a hole in the earth where the Youssefs’ house has just been bulldozed, foreshadowing what is yet to befall the family. Ghassan Hage writes that while we usually conceive of nostalgia as a time-centred notion, nostalgia for migrant communities is characterised by a greater foregrounding of place.[ii] This yearning for the ‘motherland’ is palpable among Kassab’s characters. The narrator of ‘Homing’ despairs that ‘I have spent more of my life here than there but this land is not known to me’ (194). Visiting is not so easy either: ‘Will I know anyone when I return? It could be I have been forgotten’ (200). And the question of home is not straightforward even for those born here. For poet Omar Sakr, the second-generation must also grapple with a sense of loss. He talks of his own ‘strategic distancing’ from his Lebanese family and culture: ‘Sometimes we have to leave even God behind in order to hold on to ourselves, or feel that we must, and it is so often through distance that we understand why it is we need to return’.[iii] We see this distancing enacted repeatedly in The House of Youssef, as the new generation figures out for themselves what it means to belong, what it means to come home.

I first heard Wright speak at Perth Writer’s Festival in 2019. Wright was sharp, articulate and strikingly forthright about her struggles with both her eating disorder and the mental illness that she developed as a young adult, resulting from a rare and complicated stomach condition. Wright is well known for her candid reflections about her own body and the sickness that has haunted her for over eight years. A collection of essays published in 2015 entitled Small Acts of Disappearance detailing the author’s lived experience of disordered eating and anorexia, won both the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award. Building on this work, The World Was Whole is ostensively a collection of essays that centres on Wright’s ongoing struggle of living with chronic illness, yet this collection is ultimately a series of reflections about home.

Through her unapologetic and unflinching gaze into the fraught spaces she often inhabits, Wright seems to be asking a series of questions both of herself and the reader: Is our first childhood experience of home our real, our definitive home? How can we be at home when our houses do not belong to us, forcing us to be transitory? Can we find ‘home’ through our non-human connections with the world? And a central, repeated and deeply confronting theme — what happens when we cannot be at home even within our own bodies? It is this quintessentially human longing for home, a will to authentically and comfortably inhabit our corporeal existences and belong in the world, that Wright so skilfully taps into, drawing us in to connect with the unique territory she inhabits. We may never know what it means to be so ill at ease in our skin, but we do know what it means to want to be at peace with ourselves and our world, to have a place to belong, an anchor in place and time. On this theme Wright reflects:

That the body and the home are linked is nothing new … the physicality of the body, unthinking, untameable, animal, is important primarily because it is the thing that carries, or houses, our rational, remarkable minds — it is the home, that is, for who we are. (6)

Yet for Wright, we learn, disease ‘unhomed’ her (14), a phrase that made me flinch, caused me to catch my breath. The World Was Whole reads as a slow and shifting journey between grief and acceptance as Wright slowly come to grapple with the idea that she may never be well, may never reacquaint with her former health-filled self.

While The World Was Whole is cohered by Wright’s reflections on her ongoing struggles with illness, through her embodied experiences, we also encounter so much more through her lucid lens. The World Was Whole touches on themes of feminism and domesticity, urban planning and design, racism and the Cronulla riots, consumerism, friendship, displacement, vulnerability, interdependence, pet ownership and the joy of eating peaches. The work takes us through the streets of the inner and outer suburbs of Sydney, to Shanghai, the Surf Coast of southern Victoria as well as the volcanic world of Iceland in the spring. In the Chapter on Iceland titled ‘A Regular Choreography’, Wright steps into her own, esteeming the ordinary need for rhythm and routine against what Rita Felski names as the ‘vocabulary of anti-home’, as our contemporary global world privileges change and uprootedness over the desire to settle and sink roots:

But standing still, or moving in repeated tiny orbits — this is how we connect with, and cope with, the much more ordinary existence that is really the stuff of so much of our lives; and our habits are how we attend to it, pattern over it and shape it — unspectacularly, perhaps, but beautifully, gently, and in a continual and immanent present. (161)

Of all the strange ironies, my review of The World Was Whole was originally intended to be submitted in January, however due to becoming chronically ill after handing in my doctorate, it was months before I could return to finish reading Wright’s work and think about how best to review it. What shocked me most about my illness was not just everything I could no longer do, or only do with extraordinary effort, but how incredibly lonely that struggle became. ‘Illness is a state we do not think of as everyday’, Wright says, ‘but it affects those of us it impresses upon every single day’ (5). Those impressed upon, those with chronic disease, Wright tells us, add up to twelve million people in Australia, with mental health conditions being the second most prevalent form (184). Chronic illness means you occupy the world in a fundamentally different way from others, even those you love the most. Sometimes people understand you and sometimes they do not. Sometimes people believe the challenges you face on a daily basis and respond with heart-warming acts of empathy, but when your illness is not obvious, often they do not.

When I returned to Wright’s collection six months later, a larger, far more empathic space had been carved out in me, yet still at times I found points of resistance to the difficult world she presents so openly to the reader again and again. My own resistance reminded me of an article I read early in my doctoral research (I no longer know the title or author) about the ongoing challenge Disability Studies faces to receive funding and credibility in Australian universities. The author argued that a huge amount of prejudice exists in the Arts and Humanities because of a cultural resistance that stems from our unconscious fears of our own corporeal natures. We are happy to study race in universities because the suffering of others that white readers witness in these works will not become their own; a white person can relax in the knowledge that they will never suddenly and unexpectedly become black. Yet we are all so dependent on the physicality of our bodies, bodies that will inevitably at some point fail us. This is where Wright’s story becomes all of our story, and this is where her steady gaze becomes an offering, a difficult gift. If we can respond unflinchingly to Wright’s honesty about her body, if we can seek out those places in us that resist the telling, then we may find we come back to ourselves and others with more tenderness and care, and in doing so, truly honour our own bodies as well as the diversity within our communities, for it is our bodies and our communities that ultimately offer us a home.

What is the relationship between poetry and music? And what does it mean to listen to the aural tapestries which music makes, to trace our own paths of response and offer them back into words for communication? The questions regarding what is occurring when we listen – what precisely we are listening to, how we receive and interpret the text of music – and how we might become part of that weave of call and response, are central to the role of art and its reception more broadly. They are also similar to what we might ask specifically in relation to the production and interpretation of poetry. Martin Langford’s eighth and most recent collection, Eardrum, uses a range of poetry and prose to articulate these problematics so central to any aesthetic enterprise; in so doing, he draws the reader into the spell of his own poetic thinking and listening, embodying the complex relationship between words and music, composing and interpretation. The two art forms are shown here to be intertwined, looking both inward to contemplation and outwards towards connection, to delights in the moment of apprehension and to link us to broader purposes.

The first section or ‘movement’ of the book includes poems which focus both on elements of paying attention to the art form of music as well as on particular instances of its performance. Langford’s tastes in and knowledge of musical styles is vast; his commentary ranges from classical composers such as Brahms, Mozart, Beethoven and Bach through to Shostakovich, Mahler, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, Ariana Grande. While often bounded within genre and form, Langford’s writing suggests that  music occurs in a variety of places for a variety of purposes and effects.

The production of music, while often broad in its appeal, is of course bounded within the specificity of its context. For instance, the poet notes,

In Brahms’ world, kindness was possible. There were flowers in the wood, the conservatory. The composer looked out over laneways where sun starked and haloed the branches all day.

(26)

By contrast, in ‘Shostakovich Trio, Opus 67’, in the shadow of Soviet control, ‘the bones are all dust, / and the crimes of the tyrants forgotten’, leaving only lingering ‘dances and airs’ (28) to the survivors. Or, in ‘1956: Graduation Ball’, the smug and sexually repressed Board members, ‘squeezed into waistlines’, are also subject to music as an organising principle: ‘Bass counts it in, One-and -Three… (9). Even Ariana, at her tribute concert to the victims of terrorism in Manchester in 2017, ‘just keeps on singing / and wearing those pants’ (55). Music, as a principle of organised sound, designed to engage us both emotionally and intellectually, can be seen to undertake a number of roles: to galvanise community, to express the depths of human spiritual and sensual yearning, even to act as ideological enforcer.

The ability to make music – to put sound sequences and pitch and pause together in such ways that speak to human experience, that arrest and challenge the listener – is found in both culturally elevated spaces and also within the environments of the everyday. In the ‘kerfuffle’ of the concert, with its ‘evening dress/maestro’s spak hair’ (34), Langford identifies a persistent impulse ‘to establish… / that they –  / and all those who are present – / are more than the void’. As William Carlos Williams once wrote, ‘Sing me a song to make death tolerable’; in this sense, every aesthetic act plays, like Orpheus, across that void – again and again.  Yet in ‘Caravan Park’, in a very different cultural milieu, ‘Someone / plays loud, tinny rhinestone. Yearning / and grief rise to climaxes, yearning and grief’ (49). In ‘Hornsby Fountain’ the ‘man from the council’ cleans the statue and plays the civic bells as though he is milking a cow, ‘one squirt at a time’, and ‘transporting’ the audience of ‘proud ratepayers’ (41).

In the second section of the book, ‘Minims’, Langford returns to the form of the aphorism to revisit a number of key themes: ‘We prefer the songs of loss / to be sung / by the glamourous and available’ (75); or, ‘Janis: / whose suffering was big enough / for the new amplified instruments’ (77); or ‘The fugue knows / you’re not so important’ (102). This collaging of observations, asking to be extended in contemplation like the fullness of the minim expanding into the bar, are tight, hard-won jewels of insight; their crafting here in almost haiku-like form, intensifies and shortens the effect – a kind of staccato of observation.

The book’s third movement, a series of essays, has a different kind of gravitas. Here, in the different linguistic terrain of prose, Langford continues to explore his engagements both with specific composers, the performance of music itself and the ‘sisters’ of poetry and music (117). Reading a little like a series of notes written over a long period of immersion in music and its attendant ideas, these writings articulate the ideas that arise implicitly in the poems themselves; they are a linking together of philosophical musings and judgements, for example ‘Brahms understood … that Beethoven had failed to summon the eternal, that the project was dead’ (119), or ‘In our urban spaces, our most characteristic use for music is as soundtrack: we play narrative-momentum music, on the nominal theme of love’ (137). Whether this section functions as an entirely successful juxtaposition of parts – poems, aphorism, note-like essays – or is redundant in its repetition of somewhat unstructured ideas, it does suggest a serious-minded effort to bring our attention to the interplay of poetry and music, where ‘[r]ather than being protagonists in a migratory narrative, one might think of them [poetry and music] as participants in a dance’ (117).

This is a book of philosophy and poetry which asks intellectual as well as aesthetic questions about what art does and how we respond to it. The linked impulses to create both poetry and music are explored together with the complex business of being the receiver of art forms which ‘dance’ at the edges of what is definable and what is not.

Like us in many respects, the people of Hollow Earth nonetheless have created a society that’s more harmonious than ours. Though, as Manfred says, ‘[i]t is no utopia.’ (42) Hollow Earth is described as a world imbued with ‘telekinetic empathy’ that makes speech universal and human differences cherished (37–38). It’s unpolluted by acquisitiveness and power, unravaged by industry, and unspoiled by religious and cultural divisiveness. We’re told, in a foreshadowing of its future, that when the people of the Surface world finally tunnel down to colonise and exploit Hollow Earth, the surface dwellers who seek refuge there are accommodated by the Hollow Earthers (38).

After living in Hollow Earth for a year and a half, Manfred returns to the Surface with Hollow Earthers, Ari and Zest. They travel to Australia on forged passports, believing that Western Australia’s Walwalinj (Mount Bakewell), a site familiar to readers of Kinsella’s poetry, will provide a way back down to Hollow Earth. Instead, they find the entrance sealed. The story then follows their efforts to return to Hollow Earth, taking them from suburban life in Fremantle, to the York agricultural show, to London’s Occupy protests. They encounter the Surface world, its novelty as experienced by Ari and Zest, and the damage it metes out on them through alcohol and drugs.

The story is told in short chapters or vignettes or fragments – some as short as a few words, none more than a few pages in length – which gives the novel a lightness of touch and a sense of pace. Science fiction devotees who enjoy the elaborate world-building the genre is notorious for will find Hollow Earth very brisk. Kinsella’s account of the geography and technology of Hollow Earth is brief: what’s important, for the purposes of the novel, is the character of its society, and the contrast that’s drawn to the rapacious world of the Surface, described in one place as ‘a world of war against all life.’ (51) While the chapters intersperse Manfred’s past with the present exploits of the folie à trois, the story’s briskness leaves the characters of Ari and Zest undeveloped and largely undifferentiated until the novel’s later stages, as we ultimately see the toll that life on the Surface takes on them.

The novel is a parable and a polemic. We readily recognise the villains of Kinsella’s story – exploitative mining companies, developers, complicit journalists, bigots, and the wreckers of the environment. It’s an interesting proposition that Hollow Earth may be read as an analogue for our future, a comparable world contained ‘within’ our own that’s jeopardised by the excesses of our present. Where the novel is too explicit and vehement in its intent it loses some if its potency as a parable. At its best, parable is a deeply subversive mode of writing. It smuggles into a reader its secondary freight of meaning. The subversiveness of that secondary meaning, to borrow from the thesis of David Marno, writing about John Donne’s poetry in Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention, is that we receive it as a ‘cognitive gift’ (Marno, p. 3). If a parable’s range of secondary meanings is subtle enough, we construct them substantially ourselves and those thoughts occur to us as our own. In contemporary film parlance, an effective parable performs a kind of inception.

Hollow Earth is political and a work of persuasion. Readers disposed to Kinsella’s concerns will doubtlessly concur with his critique. More sceptical readers, who might have been persuaded or provoked by a less forceful, more subversive book, perhaps won’t escape the sense that the story is being told, or sold to them, with intent. For those, a softer touch might’ve been warranted. Or, perhaps, the time for such subtlety is passed, as our world continues apace with its ‘war on life’.

Hollow Earth is engaging. The writing feels raw in places, but this rawness, along with the fragmentation of the short chapters or vignettes, compounds its sense of urgency. The story won’t disappoint a casual reader of science fiction, and it’s a compelling reminder of the genre’s possibilities, and of the utility of empathy and imagination as tools of persuasion. Hollow Earth takes Kinsella and his readers into rewarding new terrain and, at once, broadens and consolidates his already substantial oeuvre.

I began writing this review during Easter, which in retrospect seems rather appropriate. Norman Erikson Pasaribu, in Sergius Seeks Bacchus, interrogates Christianity and its rituals, and the presumption of an exclusionary principle in which the Elected partake of the joys of paradise and resurrection. Throughout this collection of cascading sadness, the poet counters the exclusionary through a kind of imagist rationality in order to celebrate a longed for inclusivity of gender in all its possibilities. The exclusionary is layered, as a member of the Christian Batak community in a predominantly Muslim nation, and most essentially as a gay man in a conservative society.

The scope of the book, however, does not seek to make marginality the poet’s imprimatur but to insist upon a glorious inclusivity. By employing the aesthetics of distance, which reminds me somewhat of the technique of Ocean Vuong, Pasaribu orchestrates a visionary inclusivity counterpointed with tragic examples of ruined lives, lives cut short in brutal and sordid circumstances, lives which suffered exclusion from family, and were tethered in social ridicule and distaste. As a counter-narrative to this the poet sets up images of a society transformed where the excluded can be fully present, in love and ordinariness.

Sergius Seeks Bacchus begins with some highly charged personal poems. 'Erratum' presents a break with the family:

and here, not long after his first book came out, as his family sat cross-legged together and ate, he told them it wouldn’t end with any girl, much less the Toba or Karo kind, and here as he stood by the side of the road that night, all alone, cars passing him, Don’t ever come back, Banci, and he wept under a streetlight, frightened as the first drops of rain misting his hair,

(1)

The poetry then moves outwardly from self-reflection to the wider world and to encompass suffering as family, as faith, as prototype at the beginning of Christian history. In the titular poem, Pasaribu looks to the early Christian lovers, Sergius and Bacchus:

…With him you’ll rise up to heaven and wonder at how familiar it all feels. Hand in hand, you two will stroll the streets, introducing one another to everyone you meet.

(5)

The locus of the catacombs reveals its modern equivalent in 'On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Car Park at fX Sudirman Mall':

…A friend dismissed their feelings as unnatural urges but each of them knows who he is now. Both are sure the longing they feel is genuine longing and the love in their hearts is the same love that made Sergius and Bacchus one, and the loneliness they feel in their vacant rooms is no different from John Henry Newman’s from 1876 to his death,

(45)

What follows is a series of poems dedicated to those who have died young and broken.  Christy, in 'Cooking Instant Noodles at the End of the Rainbow':

…wanted to be buried cute – in pink ribbons, foundation, a little powder, blush, mascara, and a frilly dress.

…They found her body underneath a bridge. She’s been saying she missed the taste of her mother’s sayur lodeh.

(9-10)

In 'What the Dead Asks from the Departed', a friend falls in love:

…But one night you showed up sobbing, I caught something from him, your neck swollen, teeming with blisters like a piece of barbari bread… …Just before Christmas I heard you were dead: the blood from your wrists flooded your parents’ bathroom floor.

(12)

Pasaribu successfully opens up this world of sadness, incorporating it into a paradisaical vision of inclusivity. This is seen at its most epiphanic in 'Scenes from a Beautiful Life' where in ‘an imaginary park/in the heart of the city’ complete with ‘the grove of pines, the grassy lawns/dotted with all kind of flowers’:

All the waria in the city work there. Males-to-females as gardeners and street sweepers, security guards, vets, and arborists, landscape architects and accountants, recreation managers and lifeguards too – ready to dive in after anyone who can’t figure out how to get back to land. They’ll never go hungry again, never have to wait for the cars that slow, then stop.

(22-23)

One integrating feature of the collection is the employment of the Tree as a protean metaphor. There are suggestions of a wider cultural metaphor through such symbolism as the Tree of Life, or in referencing the Crucifixion, through the Tree as Sacrifice, but the overriding sense of the presence of the Tree is through loving connection, as a panoply of leafy green in verdant inclusivity. A withering of foliage is suggestive of the absence of truth. In 'Poetry', the closeted protagonist presents a candid appraisal:

This whole time, loneliness has been your leafage, green and shaggy and lush. What a fine tree,they all think, on the verge of buzzing with bees and bursting with fruit. But you’re withering, your trunk and twigs diminishing, the benalu in your branches eating away at your heart.

(6)

In 'He and the Tree', a number of approaches are brilliantly entwined, with the poet seeking ‘forgiveness for his grandad, the palm oil/company’s founder’ from a tree weeping for ‘his childhood friend who had been ripped/from the earth.’:

The tree regretted not telling his friend that he loved him. If he were here, he would take him to a church. At the altar they would be joined together before god, who had three branches – like a tree – and their children would fill the lot, every single square inch, so that someday everyone who passed would think a forest had sprung up in the city’s heart.

(4)

In 'Curriculum Vitae 2015', the poet reflects on the trauma of childhood, with shunning from family and community:

6) Some of the neighbours forbade their kids from playing with him and his brothers because his family was Batak and Christian. ... 10) One Sunday morning, his father took him and his brothers to jog and play soccer on a badminton court nearby. You banci! His father screamed in front of everyone.

(56)

However, at almost 23, the poet ‘felt that he was male. And he saw it wasn’t bad.’ (57)

In this big-hearted, sometimes grungy and ultimately celebratory book, Sergius and Bacchus imagines a time:

whenever anyone is walking alone in the dark they will hear from every window on every building on both sides of the street, voices reaching out, ‘Salam!’ ‘Salam!’ ‘Salam!’

(58)

In a collection sweeping up much of the pivotal experiences, richness and complexity of human life, Andy Kissane displays a mastery of the poetic form developed over his four previous poetry collections. The Tomb of the Unknown Artist deals with the fundamental experiences of being human: birth, death, and the living, loving and losing we do in between. With his characteristic close attention, strong narrative structure, and full palette of protagonists and perspectives, Kissane looks at what it means to be a relational being, exploring our capacity for connection and disconnection with humans and the more-than-human world.

The collection is divided into four unnamed parts. The poems in the first part are the broadest in scope and the most universal – dealing with the essential human experiences of birth, death and the big questions around how we should live. Elements of the natural world serve as similes and metaphors for some of these fundamental experiences, such as in ‘Alone Again’ (3), which won the Australian Poetry Journal’s 2015 Poem of the Year, and ‘Domestic Dreaming’ (21), where the rhythmic pull and wash of ocean and river waters are compared with the calming certainty of the womb.

Other poems explore what it means to experience and connect with the natural world. In the poem ‘A Personal History of Joy’ (8), moments of interaction and union with the natural world are among the key pleasures that the protagonist considers marinate a full and well-lived human life. In some of the strongest lines of the poem, the protagonist muses:

I love how we live in sensual, sensing bodies,

how when I spy the pied cormorant lurking

on the mangrove flat, then hear the flapping of wings

and look back to see that the bird has gone, I still

have a nanosecond of its presence in my head

(8)

Other noted instances of union between humans and the natural world are even more commonplace: ‘while digging in the vegetable patch, say, / feeling for the familiar globular solidarity of a potato …’ (8).

Many of the poems in part one adopt a phenomenological approach to the natural world. Rather than it being a passive backdrop to the protagonists' lives to be sensed and consumed, there is a real dance between the protagonists’ sensory modalities and the evocative, beautiful and wise natural world they open themselves to. The poems also reveal their protagonists’ adoption of an ecocentric worldview, acknowledging both the primacy of the natural world and appreciating the wisdom and sentience of certain non-human organisms. They explore the interconnectedness and commonalities between humans and the natural world, but ultimately arrive at a view of humans as the children of this other world, both born of it and with a lot to learn from it. In ‘Walking the Murrumbidgee’ (12), the protagonist muses that

... Rivers

are so embedded in our consciousness

that we no longer see how we are their offspring—

how we begin underground, then bubble up

in heath and bog country, how we join

with other streams and gather momentum

and how at any moment of our lives

we are a droplet, a transparent surface and a deluge

(14)

In ‘A Personal History of Joy’ (8), the speaker reflects that, ‘walking in an angophora forest I can believe that trees / pass on their wisdom in ways we are just beginning / to understand’ (9).

In part two, the poem ‘Modern Whaling’ (34) examines the contemporary whaling industry and the way in which imperatives of efficiency and yield take precedence over considerations of fairness and compassion. Many readers will be affected by the accounts of the apathetic and sometimes cruel practices of modern whaling crews, such as: ‘the Japanese Captain takes out the cow first / so the bull will surface beside her, howling / for the love of his monogamous life, / a sitting target of blubber and barnacles …’ (34). The relationship between human and whale in this poem serves as a broader metaphor for our lack of empathy for and connection with the natural world. The poem ends with an invitation for the reader to consider what the current state of this relationship means for our own humanity: ‘Is this the measure of our progress—gelignite / stealth flensing the sky to a rainbow white?’ (34).

Part three contains a series of monologues by a soldier fighting in the Vietnam War, including ‘Searching the Dead’ (57) for which Kissane was jointly awarded the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. One of the strongest parts of the collection in terms of poetic technique, it contains imagery so evocative and visceral that the reader feels present on the frontline, experiencing the devastation of the local communities, soldiers, and the natural world. The latter takes somewhat more of a backstage to the human drama in this part, although the protagonist still observes it and bears witness to the fact that nature too is suffering the impacts of the conflict.

The final part deals with various ideas, many of which could be said to fall within the broad themes of art and death. The most timely poem, given the climate and bushfire crisis we are currently experiencing in Australia, is ‘Ash Wednesday, Aireys Inlet’ (74). This poem captures the experience of a resident of a small Victorian coastal town on Ash Wednesday who is watching from the beach as the fire begins to ravage the town. The fire is personified in parts, but it also transcends the human as it gains intensity, ultimately becoming the embodiment of concepts like apathy, fury and hell. The protagonist, a painter, recovers some sense of agency in capturing with his paintbrush the burning trees and the pain writ large on his fellow townspeople’s faces and some solace in the knowledge that the bush is reborn through fire. ‘But what of us?’ he or she questions towards the end of the poem, and from the empathy and inclusiveness displayed both in this poem and the collection in general, it is no stretch that the ‘us’ may encompass not just humans but also other animals and the other elements of the natural world which do not benefit from fire.

In its entirety, The Tomb of the Unknown Artist is an enriching collection, taking readers on a journey from the womb to the tomb (quite literally) and through a range of emotional and natural landscapes. It demonstrates the kind of close attention to and delight in the natural world that is sorely needed in our present moment on earth.