Mark Miller was born in Warren in western New South Wales. He attended school in Orange before graduating with an Honours degree in English Literature at the University of New England in Armidale. His first book of poems, Conversing With Stones, won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award in 1989 and his second, This Winter Beach, was published in 1999. Scanning the Horizon is Mark's third collection, featuring many poems which have won national awards, including the Henry Lawson Open Poetry Prize (2015, 2018), the Rolf Boldrewood Open Poetry Prize (2008, 2016), the Queensland Fellowship of Australian Writers Poetry Prize (2008, 2015) and the Vera Newsom Poetry Prize (2009).

Scanning the Horizon is written in two parts: 'Approachings' and 'Scanning the Horizon'. Its cover features The Road to Berry by the Australian landscape painter Lloyd Frederic Rees (17 March 1895 – 2 December 1988). Berry is a town on the south coast of New South Wales. Most of Rees's works are preoccupied with depicting the effects of light and emphasis is placed on the harmony between humans and nature. Rees’s painting complements Miller’s themes of place and identity.

Miller’s poem 'Scanning the Horizon' references Rees’s painting:

I drive the back road from Shoalhaven Heads to Berry, winding past Seven Mile Winery, the bronze-yellow scarring the ocean’s line of horizon,

The collection opens with the poem 'This Estuary'. It invites us on a journey of exploration and discovery; of rivers, seas, drought and fire.

This morning the mist comes apart before me, like fabric; like ashes –

Scanning the Horizon includes a number of haiku. The final poem in the collection: 'Haiku Sequence: In the Zen Garden' demonstrates the transience of life:

In the Zen Garden this falling cherry petal this moment passing

Miller’s subject matter and inspiration are steeped in landscape; its moods and elements, the rhythms of the seasons and weather.  In 'Haven' he writes the landscape as sanctuary and retreat:

Five o’clock on this pewter morning I take the winding track

And

here, nothing else matters but the sound of my own breathing

Written with detail and spare, precise imagery, poems in Scanning the Horizon are acute observations of the natural world, especially the Shoalhaven district of the south coast of New South Wales. They are also of loss and ageing, celebrations of family and of human interaction with nature. In 'Returning Home', a worker walks the familiar path home;

I am coming home to the shrill call of birds skittering in smudges of dull brush;

The poem Somewhere in Central Australia, recalls the Australian Government allowing British scientists to explode atomic bombs in the central Australian desert near Maralinga between 1952–1956. A Royal Commission thirty years later found that safety standards for Aboriginal peoples there had been inadequate.

Rattling, shaking through dust in the old truck- in the back with empty petrol barrels two Aborigines a young mother and her daughter crying scratching the red welts of her skin.

The collection includes poems based on personal memory, of parents, childhood and a tribute to the Australian poet Dorothy Hewett 1923 – 2002. Miller's poem 'The Return' (after Dorothy Hewett) is a reflection of her poem 'Summer'. Both poems trace early family life; daily comings and goings. It is poetry of meditation of the living world and of connection to the earth.

I will walk up the moonlit path between  the peppermint bushes to the little weatherboard house with the rusty windows facing the bay  (Hewett) I’ll walk through the open door without knocking, there’ll be two boys in shorts lying on the lounge room floor, listening to the radio (Miller)

These poems are narrative journeys; reminiscing on place and time. Mark Miller is a poet of the geographic and spiritual landscape.

Closing Earl Livings’s latest book of poems, Libation, felt like folding up a precious letter: one that revealed a master’s erudite understanding of life, the universe and everything with insight, intelligence and compassion.

Libation, defined as ‘a drink poured out in offering to a god’,[1] is an appropriate title for this collection of poems whose lines pour out with a fluidity of thought and a clarity of words dedicated to the sacredness of existence.

While the poet pronounces his atheism in the title poem, ‘Libation’, he pays homage to a mysterious spirituality which seems nourishing to his life and an inspiration to his writing, a:

Presence that encourages And deserves honour, some chance For alliance – planet, self

(10)

Livings writes of spirituality as, not just personal, but as an essence that exists in the collective unconscious so that he is able to describe ancient religious rituals and sacrificial practices as if they are memorable experiences stored in his body.

The title poem, ‘Libation’, is a toast and a reflection of the poet’s inheritance and life-to-date in 4 stanzas. These stanzas are like stepping stones where one jumps from memories of childhood to ‘this full-moon night’, from the reasonings of his ancient ancestors to the inventions of contemporary humans, from forest to seashore and beyond.

The tone and technique displayed in the title poem is typical of Livings’s poetry: free form stanzas with shortish lines, each standing out as a revelatory thought or an instruction, building one on top of the other until the narrative is spent or a crescendo is reached and the tension dissolves.

Poetic devices include smatterings of true and slant rhymes, alliteration, inventive verbs and compound nouns. They are deployed with such subtly and skill that stanzas are held together without strain. Repetition is used to great effect, sometimes to pattern whole poems, such as the stand-out recurrence of ‘Like water’ in ‘Above, Below’ (57).

Livings’s use of juxtaposition throughout the collection is a masterly portrayal of the paradoxes of life. For example, in the poem, ‘Libation’, we read of ‘common streets, holy sites’, ‘chaos designs’ and an ‘unplucked string resonating’ (10). In the evocative poem, ‘Design: Mt Ngungun’, there are ‘fellow trampers of solitude’. This poem also juxtaposes the physical difficulty of a climb with the reward of ‘the wonder of signs’

… space enough to wait … still questing for presence And essence, mine or some other elemental other, Emblem of the ultimate, evidence of homecoming –

(52)

While the reader can delve into this collection at any point – indeed the titles and first lines of all the poems provide inviting and easy entries – the sequence of the poems has a certain rationale. The collection begins with poems recalling childhood wonder followed by adolescent questioning, particularly about the nature of the universe, and, after the attainment of formal astronomical knowledge, a poetic exploration of the vast materiality and emptiness of space.

The next grouping of poems deals with earthly concerns, particularly death – the violent death of a young acquaintance, a eulogy to Keats, and the ageing and death of a parent. The subject matter then shifts from personal history to ancient history.

Livings’s personhood is expressed boldly when writing about ancient human civilisations and generations of men thrusting themselves forward to the present. These poems embody physical strength, sometimes brutality, sometimes lust, sometimes the quickness of involuntary muscle-twitch. However, the poet also reveals a feminine sensibility and a joy in the ‘other’s joy’ of sexual intimacy. Of note are the poems ‘Alien Dispatch’ and ‘Dream Bird’ which I like to think are acknowledgements of a struggle (sometimes a dark one) with the poet’s feminine side or, possibly, a female muse. ‘Alien Dispatch’ opens with ‘I’m not supposed to know your name’ and finishes ‘Write soon’. (18, 20)

And then Livings writes of entering into the ecological realm. In ‘Climbing the Tree’ the reader is taken to:

… notice the way your back eases Into the veins of bark as you regard the span Of leaf, of branch and their embracing gaps, Knowing one day you will never leave here.

(75)

and in ‘Kondalilla Falls’ invited to:

... Feel if you can Through the soles of your feet the thrumming Of this quickening water, the mountain quivering.

(77)

The poet also welcomes the intrusion of natural phenomena into his domain. In ‘Summer Adepts’ it is ‘a bevy of rainbow lorikeets’ that ‘chatter like children at a birthday party’ and in ‘Little Wattlebird’ he waits for the bird that ‘broadcasts’ its arrival:

The soft throaty Yekkop yekkop, That shnairt! of alarm

(72)

In ‘Tawny Frogmouth’, the house-trapped bird ‘shudder-drops’. ‘We coo and shoo.’ (15)

Livings’s ability to bring sound-beyond-words into his poems is extraordinary; even silence, which is often present in the poems, seems to have a resonance. ‘Music for Nothing’ starts:

Imagine this: the bass note Of the Big Bang dropping deeper

(21)

while the final stanza begins:

Now imagine nothing, the final Still note

(22)

Livings’s poems come from an all-embracing cosmic viewpoint. The current state of post-modern society is not an explicit theme. He is more interested in exploring the nature of homo sapiens as an explanation of how we have ended up here.

In ‘Letter to William Blake’ he writes:

Two hundred years on And we’re still not listening

(47)

The poems are evidence that Livings is a seeker who, like Blake, ‘glimpses’

The opening to Eden inside A flower

(47)

and one who identifies with his hunting ancestors when he writes:

Never the day ending without bowed awe

(38)

Cry of the Curlew is the poetry of presentness. Allis Hamilton shares her embrace of the natural world through these poems and in them we find a world that is conscious, directed and knowing. She has returned to the country:

that grew me up, that stretched me tall, that sang me deep, that built my bones and poured my blood.

('Returning')

Nature is personified almost to an animistic level. A major theme is sitting with the trees and the wind and listening to the sounds of birds and hoping to hear the voice of the Bush Stone-Curlew which is endangered in New South Wales. Another major theme is around stories. Sometimes these stories are lost, sometimes they are waiting to be found. There is a nostalgia for an earlier Indigenous understanding:

If one knows how to look, stories of before lie all over this land; I sense an immense gap in my learning.

('Artefact')

This book came about as a result of her residency at two Bush Retreats for Ecological Writers (BREW) at the Retreat Farm on Pinchgut Creek in the Riverina region of New South Wales. It is Wiradjuri country. Hamilton does not encounter any Wiradjuri people during her stay but she feels their absence, particularly in the sense of stories that are lost.

Much of the poetry has an ekphrastic quality where the presence of a stone or a handful of feathers gives rise to a fully realised meditation on the object. She also has a shamanic intuition and in one poem becomes a 'Birdgirl', who slips out into the night and sings down her fear, turning circles, sprinkling seeds, giving voice to the songs of birds and welcoming all the different animals who:

rise and join her along the sway of the creek's bed as the water flows and recalls its return.

('Birdgirl')

While there are some shared themes between the poems, the opportunity to tie them together into a coherent long form is missed. The poems stand alone as discrete embodied moments. A little bit more proof reading would also have helped, for example, 'The weather will envelope you', should read 'envelop'.

However, there is much to enjoy in this book and the author is to be congratulated for sharing her very personal journey through these poems. They demonstrate an encounter with nature that is in many way an ecstatic communion.

You will breathe in ancient air and exhale into every possible transition to an awakening that is fed by love, that is fed by an intricate care for all manner of things that hold this place together and you will feel your skin melt into the land melt into the existence of this blessed earth as she holds you and holds and holds you.

('Presence')

Sticking through the trouble

In a 2011 interview with Michael Brennan, Pam Brown describes how she often has 'three of four poems on the go simultaneously'. The four poems comprising her latest award-nominated collection click here for what we do reflect that simultaneity. Brown ends 'left wondering', the second of the four long poems, with an extended meditation on the work, politics, and life of the American abstract expressionist Agnes Martin that extends beyond the asterisks Brown uses to indicate potential section breaks:

‘no halfway with art’ lone     sole      singular * you’ll never know

what

abstraction

is

unless

you ask

the women

* to dream another grid

(75)

Brown’s poems register as an attempt at this grid – individual moments flow into the next but speak as easily to other sections, addressing how, as she states in a foam:e interview, 'nothing in my books is chronological'. There is a consistent plurality to both the interconnectedness of the sequences, but also the voice within them. As in the sections quoted above, a digression on the 'lone' is answered by asking 'the women' plural. It’s a complicated and rewarding poetic intersubjectivity.

Hence, although it is tempting to discuss click here for what we do in terms of its everydayness as the poems traverse the mundane months between, 'october already / * / the last night / of september' and 'almost february again / (I’m not ready)', I am conscious of how Brown describes being 'tired of "the quotidian" as both a descriptor and a topic' (9; 143; poetry international). Instead she says she is 'interested in "the poetic" – that is, in language play, in unpredictable word use and in the eccentric use of text on the page' (poetry international). Even the seemingly ordinary language of the opening and closing lines quoted above, when placed side by side register a complicated (but playful) connectivity.

Brown starts working from a 'pile of linguistic debris' (foam:e). From the title onwards, click here for what we do displays a pleasing ambivalence towards the linguistic overabundance of contemporary life, one that Brown renders both a thing of joy and complication. Memory – always a fertile ground for poetry – is particularly slippery here, moving between an understanding of individual reflection and memory in all its technological and cybernetic forms. In 'susceptibility song', the third poem, we come to see how:

the past

is stifling

I was susceptible to it

until now

(82–83)

The linguistic detritus Brown uses to piece together her poems reflects the sheer accumulation of data associated with the cyber age, under which the past is subsumed by a flat horizontal present where we are:

adrift

in technology’s

excess of memory so take a walk wet weather

(97–98)

As the sequence of poems moves forwards, the reference to weather becomes imbued with concerns about climate crisis, in 'A mockery' she writes:

we’re talking about the past having no influence like some disastrous Great Leap Forward

(126)

And later:

the modem’s in the wardrobe the memory is full

what is to be done?

(130)

When asked how she came first to poetry, Brown mentions lists and a continuous fascination with them has dominated her work (poetry international). Lists, of course, suggest incompleteness, an infiniteness without defined beginning and end – much the same issues as Brown wrestles with regarding the intersection of memory and technology.

In a 2003 conversation at Balmain with John Kinsella (recorded in Jacket magazine), Brown states that 'we’re all "made" things, we’re all becoming cyborgs'. Kinsella then raises Donna Haraway’s 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, theorising that 'apart from an obvious concern about ethics' in Brown’s work, 'the text itself becomes cyborgian, becomes genetically modified'. One type of cyborgian genetic intersubjectivity Brown has long practiced, and continues to practice in click here for what we do, is the recycling and repurposing of other writers and theorists into her own poetry. Donna Haraway specifically gets a shout-out in click here for what we do (additional eclectic references include Rosemary Waldrop, Justin Clemens, Ellen Van Neerven, Walter Benjamin, Yothu Yindi, Samuel Beckett, and Kim Hyeesoon among others):

in the lane

everyday

casual anthropocentrism

should scare quote that & then declare

resistance

to the term

(donna haraway’s trouble)

(84)

In her 2016 Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway expands on her neologism 'Cthulucene'. 'It is a simple word', she writes, 'a compound of two Greek roots … that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth' (2). The lists in click here for what we do are key means by which Brown confronts the seeming excess of tragedy in an age of constant witness to political and environmental crisis. After listing the events association with a 'cycle of terror', Brown wonders:

does a list like that do any work? * that’s a question

you’ve been asking

for half a century

(wondering

who’ll be swift

to chide)

(100–1)

By constantly refusing a singular linear poetics and insisting on togetherness and plurality as an ethical and poetic stance, Brown models a way of 'learning to stay with the trouble', of continuing to question that is simultaneously joyful and mournful for both writer and reader in collaboration.

Works cited

Brown, Pam. 'Interview with Pam Brown.' Interview by Michael Brennan, Poetry International, 1st July 2011

---. 'Interview with Pam Brown.' Interview by Angela Gardner, foam:e, March 2015

---. 'Pam Brown in Conversation with John Kinsella.' Interview by John Kinsella, Jacket Magazine, 5th July 2003 Haraway, Donna. Simian, Cyborgs and Women: Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. ---. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.

Warning signs, gradual annihilation, little deaths and a changing landscape: Precarious Balance in Magdalena Ball’s High Wire Step

 

Magdalena Ball’s High Wire Step is a collection of mass extinctions, little deaths, and incremental disappearances. Here, the poetic captures the dystopic. It’s an imagination of small-scale disasters and tragedies that build into sadness, dry anger and disgust. Here, Ball’s contempt for short-sighted human greed and ignorance is measured by her wit and compassion. It is a collection full of radical empathy, understanding a shared vulnerability with each other. It claims multispecies alignments with animals—bees, cats, wolves, pigs, chameleons—and with our environments, in the precarious conditions created through the Anthropocene.

Every poem is encompassed by loss. The dystopic here is in powerlessness. The sense that one individual can do nothing to stop the gradual accumulation of destruction and species loss at the hands of collective humanity and individual interests.

Angry at my impotence and guilt Am aware that I can’t save anyone Not even myself In this beautiful, ravaged world.

(‘Trickle-down’)

From the opening poem Ball weaves timeframes, precarity, vulnerability and the indifference of contemporary life, its subtle menace. The cruelty of schoolyards moves into the present:

now it’s coffee and barking dogs

the wind turns   maybe a storm is brewing

(‘to prove I’m a bastard’)

Here:

everyone           has to be first in the queue so the rest of us can be last pretending to be the bastard

because who wants to be the victim

(‘to prove I’m a bastard’)

In transactions of waiting, money and product, everyone rushes to get in front, none willing to admit they are all subject to the same forces. Cruelty and indifference become the tool for asserting the illusion of autonomy in the situation.

The market economy and the way in which it shapes life, shapes thought, is laid bare, with humour as well as condemnation. Ball’s speaker acknowledges the insects sharing the existence in their house, the sound of them in their home, comments: 'I left them all my money in the DIY will kit / free in the Crackerjack box' (‘kindly note’). House listings fall away. 'You were notified / it was urgent but / you never wrote back' is the impulse that falls through most of the poems. Urgency ignored after all the signs were there. Violence for resources becomes couched in terms of loyalty, country and personal struggle. Bodies become 'commodity for vested interests' (‘Trickle Down’). Humanity is maintained only in the recognition of responsibility to other beings.

The most impactful of the poems are those that meditate on the grief of species extinctions and environmental loss. Here the lines are surrounded by gaps and absence. There’s no concealing the loss and anger that comes with them:

When the sea rises to eye level

tears become redundant

(‘precarious inscrutable’)

The red list of endangered species is too large to even comprehend, the gaps standing for the increased silence of organisms, filled in with violent sounds and the sound of everyday life profiteering. Filled in with words and plastics. Wholesale destruction sold by industry.

I wasn’t sure which        was the real origin of grief the personal or the ecological      or if     speaking the words identifying a new epoch        was a beginning or        an end

(‘Anthropocene’)

Classification itself becomes risky business, as is recognition of the problem. Its large web of damage. It becomes overwhelming.

There is interiority to Ball’s poems, but this interiority outside of these imagined empty rooms is full of life and shared existence, always imperilled by external forces. Spaces are filled with families filled with convention, 'floral chintz and animated voices / not our own / spoke of films we hadn’t seen' (‘Claude Glass’). Light is filtered through lenses—through lanterns, 'a convex black mirror' (‘Claude Glass’), windows unable to be broken. Gatherings punctured by feelings of loss, a feeling of inescapability.

Their bodies didn’t know how to wait because every day someone was crying and it was too much. The house next door was the same house no one knew where they lived anymore. The city was moving in and these pink houses could no longer keep us safe.

(‘Claude Glass’)

Through parties and ceaseless movements, Ball captures a feeling of terror. Hunger for stability. Unrelenting sadness. People get pushed out by market forces which remind those that stay of their vulnerability within the system. Forces which cause people to lose touch. This terror becomes abstract, first in money then in cryptocurrency, always with material impact on humans and their environment: paradoxically, 'the placebo effect is real' (‘To what retracting’) especially when tied to language, power and its structures. Too much sadness threatens to become too overwhelming to look beyond one’s own being, an individual escape. This is a trap that always brings the speaker back to the same point, waiting even in transit.

Ball uses the science fiction mode and its tropes to critique its own escapist fantasies. In ‘Obfuscated’ a body becomes progressively pixelated without awareness until it is too late. Meanwhile in ‘Timebound’ taking on other identities and time-zones has no difference or consequence. Information passes too quickly to write down. Robot overlords are mere visitors, every human is a cyborg 'stifling emotions with logic and calculation'. All flee their timelines if they can, leaving behind responsibility. Ball’s speaker makes a choice:

I came home, riding wave packets in reverse not because the future is impossible or the asymmetry of chance, just because if the universe were different and this were true I wouldn’t be here to observe it

(‘Timebound’)

As the title of the poem suggests, we are timebound, fixed to the material present. We can predict and have fantasies of time-travel and plans for the future, but we must be aware of our responsibilities to our shared lived existence. Time is urgent and present. Its effects are accumulative from the past but it’s in the present that the future forms. This thread also runs through the realist poems.

The sensation of being controlled by external forces is captured in ‘The Government’s Lottery’, which weaves humour with condemnation of how the repetition of senselessness and defensive humour creates a sense that care is passé. 'My life created by a random plot generator / before Earth became a meme'. A lottery win is contrasted with images of threatened marsupials, a sense of ‘I’ve done my part trying to save them’ with little sense of actual ethical accountability to another species.

I had my pick an open door but due to having saved the world ten years previously nothing appealed.

(‘The Government’s Lottery’)

Time, and the end of time, breaks down with a loss of materiality and through autogenerated algorithms. A deluge of information tells 'a recursive story that told me everything / I didn’t want to know' and thus the speaker stops listening.

There is a sense of busy-ness to the narrators in many of these poems, a sense of movement which is more paralysis and inaction then directed and in control of time as change encroaches from every angle. Underneath this desire to capture the moment and make visible the scene is an undercurrent of perpetual motion. Small cracks in the ice grow into catastrophe as the poet gazes down the precipice. True stillness and silence, when it comes, is uncanny, 'leaving a silence so profound / it hurts the ears' (‘precarious inscrutable’). It’s the haunting absence of birds and beetles, no sounds of frogs croaking after rain. The complacent acceptance of this absence until nothing remains. Ball’s poems rally against this impulse while capturing its frustrations.

Recently on a plane flight I sat next to a young FIFO worker who asked what I was reading. 'A book of poetry, Chromatic by Paul Munden,' I replied. What came next was not unexpected. 'I don’t understand poetry!' he emphatically declared. 'Try this,' I said as I thrust Munden’s work into his hand. 'There’s no food service, so what’s to lose?' I pointed to the poem, ‘Spiders.’ He read and again declared he didn’t understand it. 'Sure you do!' I said looking at him with great expectation. Very slowly, he hesitantly whispered his understanding. It was the perfect response for a neophyte. 'See, of course you did!' I said, softening my triumph.

There was nothing left to do then, but to speak of poetry – as time flew by.

On reflection, I wondered if it was luck that I had just read ‘Spiders’ (34–35) and felt confident the poem would not intimidate him. I asked myself if any of the other poems would have been so easily accessible. ‘Spiders' is about a man with an 'unshaven chin' viewing his inner eye as 'a map / of veins like crazed pottery'. The poems’ tactile language makes visceral the experience of having an eye test. I concluded that I had lucked out in this instance. The rest of the collection was too mixed in tone, style and theme to just open at a page and find a piece that was readily understandable for a 'beginner'. I then looked at Munden’s work as a whole and the obvious became apparent. Chromatic is a series, in parts, each with its own topology. Topology comes from the Greek τόπος, place, and λόγος, study. Munden formulates groups of poems which have similar properties, all of which are sustained through their twistings and stretchings, but saved from tearing apart. The work opens up connections between different ways of living in different spaces and places, where the place of the poet’s life is the imagined quality of his existence.

Positioned between two epigraphs from English poet Sylvia Plath lies an epigraph from English poet Ted Hughes. With apologies to William Blake it comes across a bit too 'In England’s green and pleasant land(ish)' for this reviewer who struggles with how the Australian poems are reconciled in the topology.

Part 1 clearly orbits the cultural and human place-space of music. Beginning with ‘Toccata’ the first line, ‘It starts again, / the screeching / early morning practice’ (12), is a risky introduction but successful for its a-tonality of language. ‘Trench Cello’ mixes war and memory and music. The violin and the rifle. This poem is followed by a longer five-part prose poem ‘From The Encyclopaedia of Forgotten Things’ as again musical instruments, space, place and sound intermingle. Some might find the language a little sentimental, as in ‘every cloud a sweet nothing’ (18) but maybe fittingly so? ‘Fugue’ in three parts is the sensual memory of a place in England where pleasure and love take place ‘at seeing music take shape / from the simplest of ideas’ (27). ‘Chopinesque’ (29), and ‘A Night at the Opera’ (30) are followed by poems which seem out of kilter with the previous set, one ‘Kick / Recall’ (33) recounts the memory of a t-shirt worn on the way to hospital, and ‘Spiders’ (34–35), has some lovely moments: ‘to strike up / black forked lightning—map / of veins like crazed pottery’. The poems that follow which take us through to Part 2 are scattered with many a haunting ghostly presence ‘… howling at the moon’, ‘Why do skeletons grin?’ (45), and where ‘A Speckled Hen’ ‘still flitting among us / like a ghost, refusing to elucidate’ (55), and finally, in ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ ‘The head gardener did his duty / and blew his brains’ (61). All these poems leave discordant reverberations on the body of the whole sequence. There are many masculine presences and macabre moments are not occasional. Hairless fox cubs stillborn turned into a human wrap, where ‘He wraps around his shoulders; / fastens the bakelite clasp beneath the jaw’ (‘Foxed’ 42–43) and ‘Rat Tales’ (47) where a woman seeks out the stench of a dead rat and the memory of a child who guards a baby from rats. I could smell the rat when I read this poem. I have to admit I found ‘Molehills’ (62–63) the most malevolent. To ‘smoke the little fuckers’ out, the moles are subjected to immense cruelty. Yes, the escape is a ‘temporary reprieve’ (63) and all the more repugnant for being so. ‘Ladybirds’ (64), a short prose piece, narrates the scene of a man clipping a hedge, where ‘bright drops of blood’ become evident as he then ‘set(s) about his task with greater care’ (64), leaving us with images of blood red, ‘darkening sky’ and ‘Fat pearls of water … like a swarm of little ghosts.’ In ‘Ladybirds' Munden crafts the most superb description of ‘a pigeon, with scissoring wings.’ I have long tried to describe the pigeons around my home whose wings make the noise and movement of … ? Now I know. They scissor. Except my bush pigeons scissor with the sounded twist of an unoiled hinge.

The penultimate poem ‘English Pastoral’ (65) chronicles the horrid image of fields in England strewn with ‘badgers—too many dead / for a coincidence’ (65) and the ‘gathering flies’ the 'sickly critique’ that is ‘England.  / Now’ (65). The final poem in Part 1 is ‘Christmas Diptych’ in the ‘December sun’ (67) away from the ‘drab’ (66) ‘and melted snow’ (66). In this, Munden strikes the balance of colour and light, sound and scent. Our lorikeets always defy my description but Munden makes ‘its green surprise / of leaf-like wings’ ‘with flashes of red’ come to conscious awareness, much like he who reaches for his camera, only to ‘miss the whole carolling rush / into inimitable sky’ (67). Delightful.

In Part 2 Munden writes within a topological space of memoried neighborhoods and a connection with a life of the past. ‘La Tempesta’ a painting by Giorgione in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, has been called the first landscape in the history of Western painting. Munden textually sketches both an interpretation of the painting overlaid with personal memory. The landscape of the painting is prominent, the centre piece of the portending storm with tip-painted clouded lightening … is little more / than a chalky tear / in the cloud, a razor blur—’ (73). ‘Venetia Lullaby’ (74) joins the locations together in the 'mathematics' of his calculations. The features of the elements then move, angled across setting and scene as the poet travels like a tourist 'Here and There' (81) to be ‘agog at the Opera House’ (a little pedestrian). Yet this poem would have been accessible to my travelling FIFO flight-friend. He certainly would have identified with the notion ‘… that travel is rarely more / than a provisional life’ (81). Several sketches of ‘Carnarvon Gorge’ (82) and ‘Four Seasons in One Day’ (83) take us to ‘Sightings’ (85–89), and onward into place description and reflections on experiences in Australia. Even Australian poets struggle to do justice to our bird life and landscape. This brings me back to the accessibility of Munden’s work. There is nothing to stand in the way of appreciating the imagine of the Australian Magpie ‘policing / the grassy precinct /’ (87) or the ‘Blue-winged Kookaburra’ whose call is in its original Aboriginal name, as being celebrated as ‘the ancient silver cackling’ (88). Colour, sound and movement texture this short series. In ‘Heron Island’ (92), the poet is still a human tourist in an Australian natural setting all of which takes place before a series of personal reflections and personal musings. Whatever shortcomings I may have found in Part 2, Part 3 is overwhelmingly the strongest.

Part 3 begins with ‘Tethered’ (112) and delivers in parallel structure a strong sequence of two lined impressions, culminating in the final line ‘And the muffled squeal that won’t let go’ (112). It is a compelling short poem of place and history. ‘Chromatic’ (132) the title poem begins with ‘A frisson’, the goose-bumped shiver on the skin’s surface as a physical manifestation of an experience on hearing, seeing or feeling. This poem is rich in allusions and if one wished, open to further questions and inquiry. As ‘thrilling as pornography’ it gives a poetic account of the barbarous story of the Prince of Venosa (1566–1613) who wrote intense pieces of a-tonal sacred music to assuage his murderous guilt. We find keyed into the language of the poem startlingly abrupt shifts, reflecting the type of chromatic musical score which does not appear again until the late 19th century. 'Chromatic’ becomes the archetypal landscape for the whole of Munden’s collection. The topology of ‘Chromatic’ takes us across continents in time and space, age and memory, recalling the scope of Giambattista Vico’s 1744 theorical work The New Science.  Vico’s work argues that human culture evolves through recurring cycles, unfolding sometimes, progressing (but not necessarily) as each period reflects is own order. The emergent pattern of the Vichian cyclical principle emphasises the creative imagination, marked by shifts in the topological nature of language. Vico refers to poets in the Greek sense of 'creators'. What has Munden created by his mixed tones and circular orbits across the topography of his language-scape? How has each literal and imagined period been unfolded through his 'created' reflections? To my mind, I think Munden is more at home in England than perhaps he would like to admit as the English locations, its objects, times, days and memories resonate most authentically. One of the central ideas in topology is that spatial objects can be treated as objects in their own right and knowledge of these objects is independent of how they are 'represented' or 'embedded' in space. Which brings me to ‘The Bulmer Murder’ (141).

‘The Bulmer Murder’ is a poetic account of an event recorded centuries ago, in ‘… the strange / swift tilt of time’ (141). Its intense storyline from past to present is suffused with obsession, ‘abominable, gross’ (144) and much human cruelty. Through transcripts of time-shrouded events – climaxing in the final moment of the poets own chanced-upon personal realisation – time and location morph helix-like as the poet questions what made him copy down the account of the trial which becomes ‘like a memory’ (153) heralding the unearthing of a shocking personal truth. ‘The Bulmer Murder’ is an extraordinary achievement and would make an excellent text from which to teach across several disciplines. The subsequent poems which end the collection, are not free of ‘ghostly sigh(s)’ (161) or lost souls ‘1768’ (157) nor the protest of time. ‘In a Country Churchyard’ (162) the poets’ ‘Thirty years here, I’m still a newcomer’ (162) finds solace in recognising names but his ‘… strong but frail / memory trembles’ (162) as he comprehends the unspeakable pain of one Lorna Lee who ‘suffered amputation / unanaesthetised’ (162). This final poem ends with the poet’s mower having cut out and a grace bestowed. The mowing poet reflects on his mechanical breakdown as ‘a feeble / thing, by comparison, at which to fail: / to mow the churchyard grass; or worse, to write’ (162).

The great poet Emerson wrote that 'The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which forms a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.' Emerson concludes this meditation with, 'But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.'[i] Munden’s topology is an illusory colour and a textual music. It is tonal, not always harmonious, full of sharps and flats, exploring and experiencing, remembering and feeling, but always whole.

Sunlight and maggots … We find these on the final page of Michael Aiken’s extraordinary verse novel Satan Repentant (2018), also from UWAP. There at the close of Satan’s long odyssey, creation is undone, and the text’s Jesus unsays the world:

Jesus inhaling cannot stop saying the world backwards, in frantic reflex coughed to resay everything, restore the trees, bring back the sun. Air and mud infilled his face, corpses and weapons, maggot ridden feet, the stone of the Earth and vapour of the air, all drawn in to his enormous unhinged jaw, a thing he cannot stop unsaying …

Sunlight and maggots: that which might be returned in a re-saying of a devastated Earth and those creatures that betoken the living, composters of decaying flesh as Earth is undone.

If Satan Repentant, an epic book with its sweeping narrative told in long lines, ends on this abysmal note, The little book of sunlight and maggots unfolds as a variegated rejoinder, with its short spare poems and clarity of imagery, saying a kind of ordinary hope in the face of the eco-socially entangled tragic we live in.

The opening poem ‘Electrified’ could have been spoken by Aiken’s ‘Lucifer’ in his days of human being, though it recalls John the Baptist beheaded by Herod:

When wishes lock you in a box and desire makes a propaganda poster – your head on Salome’s plate – my limbs are gelatin: cold boiled bones hung with weak flesh

The sense of an edgy extreme inhabits the everyday (‘the propaganda poster’), as we witness betrayals of other humans and otherkind, by power and those enslaved to power. This edginess recurs in poems like ‘The ritual (killing a spriggan)’ and ‘The entertainer’. Alongside insinuations of human violence are also poems that look open-eyed at other-than-human predation: ‘admiringly’ as in ‘The kookaburra in Hyde Park’ and ‘respectfully’ as in ‘I exited bamboo,’. The latter closes with ‘a fox on the beach carefully eating eggs’. How often are we as writers told to be sparing with adjectives and adverbs. But, here ‘carefully’ is perfect, and perfectly observed.

The poet’s relation to predation is multiple, unsettled and unsettling. For some reason, ‘I doubt the panther’ had me remembering William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. If predators are a sign of a healthy ecosystem, ‘I doubt the panther’ has the panther lost in the domesticity of bureaucracy and the ‘bird of prey’ absent, failing ‘to make the forest stay’. Elsewhere though, Aiken imagines, even wishes, a different end to predation. In ‘Where did the kestrel go?’, the poet imagines a kind of euthanasia, perhaps by electric power line, rather than the slow death of a creature in a stressed habitat.

This is not the biblically imagined end of a peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb, though the poem immediately prior asks: ‘Who knows what goes on / in the mind of a lion / tamer?’

This seven line poem begins by invoking James Wright’s ghost and closes:

but the dead poet is nothing to a vital predator

The predator in question is a spider.

Finding James Wright named in this poem toward the end of the collection returns me to ‘As we stepped over tulips’, the opening poem of section two, a lucid poem that called up for me Wright’s iconic ‘A Blessing’ which ends:

Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

Not a sentiment a reader might anticipate in The little book of sunlight and maggots, given Aiken’s ‘cold boiled bones hung with weak flesh’, and his edgy engagements with more-than-human capacities for violence. But, in ‘As we stepped over tulips’, the reader finds the sunlight of the book’s title:

You caught the sun

like a child

whom the light loves.

The poem closes:

and you were happy.

In less sure hands and voice, this might be sentimental; Aiken makes it a moment of lucidity, where celebration of a instant of, I might say, ‘graced’ relation exists in the company of Earthy dangers: tiger snakes, a steep goat track, ‘so many shark infested, storm torn beaches’.

The deeper dangers, though, in the collection, the underlying relations of ecotrauma and colonial theft, are never far. There is Aiken’s overt singing of resistance to destruction in ‘The Eater of Worlds’ which appeared in hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani. And there are everywhere moments where the Anthropocene breaks in:

You have built all this now be proud.

(‘The moon over Zetland’)

as I pulled into Parramatta with my heart hanging out the old gaol the old asylum so many ways to torture the earth …

(‘These cities’)

A very short poem, just four lines, might seem innocuous were it not for the title and the intimations of climate change:

'What is so sacred about ancient fictions?' Construction workers roof the sky stepping over trees in their haste to be done with the weather.

The only longer poem in the book, ‘All are limbs of living things once living’, meanders through whale beaching, human impact on the oceans, and a nearby hospital, to suggest the interlaced difficulties of restoration of humans and otherkind:

seen

early on,

Ribcage can be

the sun still with us,

practice skeleton

left behind in the ward …

In this book, human- and other- kind are entangled not simply in the positive sense of their interconnectedness and interdependence, but in the ways power and agency are exercised across webs of influence and effect. What might be called ‘nature’ is rarely uncomplicatedly ‘nice’ in Aiken’s world.

Importantly, otherkind have agency and speak back to the human poet/reader:

Feathered vermin animate the landscape, crying out: this is ours! Behold, your work is done.

(‘Commute’)

Finally, let me revisit Satan Repentant, where God challenges / questions Satan:

Become human, know the travails of not knowing, live a life, any life, uncertain what it is, was or will be, nor what it is when it is no longer. Have the witness of powerlessness and feel the tide of power, always as its victim, to see ill and know not what may be done, nor not what to do that is not ill; …

In The little book of sunlight and maggots, Aiken takes us enigmatically, ironically, and with humour, often commuting to and from work and home, across eco-urban spaces where what to do in order to make a difference is not obvious. Deceptively simple, the poems are sharp and shifting, finely observed, building ways into attentive relations with otherkind, as well as with our own species as difficult kin, always with a confidence of voice that holds hands with a self-critical impulse, in the hope perhaps that we do not finish with an Earth unmade. For Aiken, there might be in other agencies a longed for hope:

'progression' Watching paperbarks grow in the gutter of a warehouse beside the 20km line of rail between my home and place of work, I adore the destruction they wreak – will them to succeed – bring the whole place down.

The little book of sunlight and maggots rewards reading and rereading, as on each reading its sharp imagery and clean lines disclose a little more of the human and other-than-human relations in which we are entangled. Attentiveness to what unfolds alongside and within our everyday transits, the book seems to say, may call forth a kind of response to the damages, ecological and otherwise, that haunt our human-constructed spaces.

John Mateer uses a Portuguese version of ‘John’ for both the title of this collection and its central character, while the black and white cover shows off the author’s face reflected in two mirrors. The collection plunges the reader into a world of travel, present-day seductions (including our obsession with celebrity), and modern-day concerns. It also generates powerful emotional responses.

The first sonnet takes the reader to a funeral in the 'far mountains of Honshu'. The poem concludes with the warning that the deceased '… could also be you …'. The 'you' refers to João, but perhaps also to all of us. The deceased person, and any relationship s/he may have with João is not referenced. There is 'only one of the 108 Buddhist sins erased as the bell tolls'. We read that whatever was lurking in João’s soul felt exposed through telepathy. In contrast, the writing is quite inscrutable. It’s a haunting poem, pointing the reader towards themes such as mortality, good and evil, 'pure extinction'.

At the heart of the 62 sonnets is a character firmly rooted in what Yeats and Jung called Spiritus Mundi; a sense that each place on earth, embodies all of its past historic moments. This world view is not new to First Nations peoples who view themselves as inseparable from the land. João appropriates this ontology. By doing so, Mateer is deliberately provocative but he also gives us cause to reflect. Again and again, the work taunts us to dismiss something and to then explore what might happen if we try to hold on to it. We can’t escape the zeitgeist we are born into and unfortunately the early 21^st century is an age of polarisation, and absolutism, rather than an era where oppositional forces are tolerated, upheld, and respected.

Mateer fuses together past and present, so that they become embodied by his character in moments of life which are lived in diverse locations.

     …                        Your life, not a ghosting, João, is a passing through this world into deeper memory, a searching for what’s beyond Elsewhere, an enquiry into your previous lives. You are the evening wind on an African lake, that silver rippling ...

(29)

Past and present float in and out of consciousness and back into nothingness leaving only our uncertain interpretations. Mateer pares back human existence revealing the residue of what happened before.

'João still believes in the power of literature to create a sense of belonging’ (back cover). But despite the richness of people he brushes shoulders with, he remains an outsider. He struggles to belong anywhere.

One fascinating feature of the work is that we come to see João through the eyes of an omniscient narrator who can be empathic towards João but at other times surprisingly dismissive. The narrator has access to João’s inner world, knows what constitutes his innermost thoughts and his special memories. The interplay between narrator and character is not without its problems. It seems to leave the reader questioning their own point of view. The narrator tells us how to think. This same narrator informs us that João is ‘lost’ while later goes on to tell us he is ‘not lost’ at all.

João travels everywhere, and I had to look up numerous place names to get my bearings as I moved from poem to poem. He pops up with people of some fame (many of whom I had to Google as well). He has a string of sexual encounters, but his world is one of passing moments, not sustaining relationships. Despite his worldly, literary and Buddhist interests, and his encounters with writers, singers and artists, João can seem somewhat shallow. His passing encounters with women, not to mention ‘the dominant’ in the BDSD (50) could easily be read as a string of sexual conquests.

João’s world seduces us. He has a way of bringing together somewhat more than the reader can hold. On Sunyata he reflects:

… such a being, who in the midst of breakfasting poets Brings ‘La Traviata’ and Brisvegas into a synergy that can only be listened to unspeaking, marvelled at …

(4)

Lines like this are pregnant with possible interpretation and might leave the reader longing for this delicious poet’s breakfast, wishing s/he too might obtain some intuitive feel about ultimate reality, feeling s/he ought to know more about ‘Brisvegas’, or perhaps feeling that this is just a comic shot at one of Australia’s smaller northern cities.

Whatever you might come to think of him, João takes us into our colonial and parochial past.  Of the 62 sonnets in the collection, 58 are in the section '12 years of travel’. The final section, 'Memories of Cape Town’, consists of 4 poems relating to João’s family. The section heading comes as quite a surprise, as by this stage the reader is almost at the end of the collection, having not encountered a section heading since the first page. This makes the collection seem quite out of balance. But it is does leave us with the view that after all, João did once have some family, some birthplace, some personal rootedness.

Overall, João is a challenging read and its central character is sure to provoke some powerful negative responses, but the collection is tight, thought provoking, and complex. The book encourages reflection on some big contemporary issues. The world view explored through this book, the way the poems position the central character within our human history and spirit of place, should be of particular interest to readers of ecopoetry.

Magic Gum with Pop Rocks!

'Think of a bellydancer attempting to / headstand / the baud rate of modems' (‘The Plumbing Network under Dolores Park, San Francisco’). The California Sweet is bubble gum with firework-coloured crackling bits in it – pop rocks. So much pop (linguistic, cultural) and fizz in these poems. It’s a delight to mouth the energetic and surprising language. And the crackle has an after-effect, too, when you step out into urban spaces and notice it reflected in distracted thought. Think 'Atomic teenage zigzag' style, or consider 'an overcommitted jellyfish'.

You don’t have to try hard to search out startling phrases and word combinations. I can open the book and bring them here in almost any sequence, and they tend to chime or vibrate pleasingly like 'nearby zhivago pants', 'plastic pickets', a 'hot parade of Tupperware' and 'the gravitas of early jitterbugs'.

In the first poem (‘Sundown over Badwater Basin, California’) you’re met with: 'Gorbachev / their course of salt swivelled my piñata. Atoned / to half a church of Earth I genuflect a passing limousine of shadow / and the heft of Lucas borgs or Jackson’s sharp vanilla // Mittens!' In MacCarter’s poetry, Gorbachev can be a verb, and other nouns and adjectives also feel very verby. Each line’s meanings crackle-out and spit in different directions. Michael or Peter Jackson? Russia and a Christian genuflect in the context of a poem that also seems like a Hollywood Western.

This is American-born, Castlemaine-based MacCarter’s third full-length collection following Sputnik’s Cousin (2014) and In the Hungry Middle of Here (2009), and he continually hints at a political, social, cultural, ecological and historical context for his whirligig language stylistics. For example, in an epigraph to one of the poems we have a line from Silent Spring (1962) a way-head-of-its-time text about the effect of pesticides on the natural environment and the marketing ploys set up to fool the public: 'It is an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged'.

In the poem ‘Descendant of the Donner Party’, we have what seems like a cross between the  films Meek’s Cutoff (2011), Dead Man (1995) and Spaceballs (1987): 'ichabod nobody storm trouper s stare at that double cheeseburger'. In the context of California’s pioneer history, a loose narrative thread holds to the gaze of 'ichabod', or is it nobody? Or one-or-more storm troopers? At any rate, we’re distracted 'trigonometrically', 'a jomocha shake in jodhpurs' in 'high sierra heatwaves', before inevitably swinging back to the amusing cheeseburger 'crouched deep in its bun'. It’s funny, and the language jockeys you along, but you can’t help but try to locate an 'ichabod' (a name that recurs in the book) reaching through eras beyond the limits of the cheeseburger. There are chunks of text – a phrase, one word, two words, a whole line – set up in couplets. Chunks as form. And by the end of the poem, you feel each chunk is its own island. But you intuit the archipelago – each poem feels tight or whole – and you sense a 'superfast' erudite mind trusting itself to engage with the chaos of contemporary high / low culture. This poem, for example, seems to concern the re-branding of history and the foundation of California itself.

California Sweet is separated into three parts: 'Glycogen', 'California Suite' and 'Cryptocurrency'. In 'Glycogen', there’s a 12-page poem called ‘Constanze Weber Steps off Amtrak’s Super Chief Passenger Train in Los Angeles … and Fears She Has Disembarked at the Wrong Station’. Mozart’s wife arrives at a sort of 18^th-through-21^st-Century 'station' where MacCarter uses 7Up and the film Be Kind Rewind (2008) to pun into her biography. He not only shifts attention from the lionized Mozart but places a complex industrious Constanze into the steam-wheesh of smudged time, centuries squeegeed like a Richter painting.

But it’s pointless to MacCarter around in this review when we have his book! Though, speaking of squeegees, in one of the book’s 13 illustrations by Jackie Ryan, she visually recreates a version of the ‘Constanze … ’ poem: a man in a chef’s hat, his feet tangled in video-cassette ribbon, less squeegees more roller paints a set of music notes across the sky. An hilariously scrunched chef’s hat can be found in the final passages of this sure-of-itself poem:

A third

Michelin Chef Hat. There it is

wadded up in the slot of a bagel

toaster next to the galley’s MacBook Air

its iTunes shuffling through K. 449 in E-flat major and spreading out in movements of tapioca

You could spend this entire review unpacking that stanza, but while imagining a galley’s MacBook Air, my mind went to a pop-up book, the cardboard folds opening out to expose the intricacies of a sailing ship’s interiors – MacBook near Muscat.

There is a 'Caterpillar' amusement-park ride described in a significant poem called ‘A Note on Going Superfast’. The 1980s ride, from Shakopee, Minnesota, comes out of MacCarter’s childhood and is 'eight connected dodgem-car-like-vehicles on a circular track'. Perhaps that’s the ride, the wheel, we have our hands on when we, at one point, turn the book in both hands to read a six-page poem in landscape mode called ‘Polyurethane Moriawase Display on Earthenware Platter: non-hendecasyllabic canzone for Hokkaido Prefecture sung from the coast of Big Sur, CA’. How to describe this poem? It’s as if you hear bits and pieces leaked from some futuristic made-to-look-vintage internet cable (or is it just bubble gum?) that’s strung between a Tokyo skyscraper and a Big Sur peak. Again, I’ve been made to sound like the book. MacCarter does it best. California Sweet reads to itself.

In the second section, ‘California Suite’, the poems have less jumpy linguistics and demonstrate a gentler delicacy. Enjoy the letter ‘t’ on the tongue in the following: 'tarp lights   gear / moon of title // cot or night / agate torsos' (‘John Chong on the Rail road. At Vallejo near Sacramento’). This section’s poems were made from glancing at archival material from various libraries including The Berkeley Art Museum, the Bancroft Library Pictorial Collections and the California Historical Society.

Mostly, California Sweet is a thickly read with many tangents. I got the most from each poem, the full fizz, in the first 10-15 mins of each reading session, then I had a rest. Sometimes, I tried to cut the motor entirely and slow on the lines. The book rewards slow and fast modes of reading. For example, returning to the poem ‘A Note On Going Superfast’, I read the Caterpillar ride as a metaphor for the accumulation of knowledge or the gradual influence of the world on personality. I saw the spinning dodgem car representing a phase of knowledge absorption, a phase of memory-making, and the superfast blur of these phases representing the hum of our restless quotidian brain, our now.

This ‘A Note On Going Superfast’ comes about halfway through the book and is a surprisingly reflective intermission or wink. A treatise of sorts. It begins: 'As an American teen in the later 1980s, swaddled inside the sensory input that would inform the final third of Generation X, I was pummeled with marketing jingoism designed to lasso the slacker zeitgeist of the times …'. The poem meta-poetically describes 'Commercialised language chemistry', and near its end, there is the following: 'Now, nearly 30 years later, I can taste the angle of a diphthong; fabricate speed with language, and bend a printed page into an origami Danaus plexippus. Or, at least, give it a white-hot go.' The magic-gum language-stylistics of the rest of the book are here, in this poem, but there is also a personal, direct approach. I wondered if I wanted more of this contrast: MacCarter at home in 'Springtime 2015 in Castlemaine, Victoria'. But that would be to blunt the collection’s thesis. This poem is the tease or pivot or breather, in the hungry middle, before returning to embed ethical questions in a display of language exploration and to mimic the speed of information. The book appears to consider if something is lost in noise, but then there’s the memory of noise, and nostalgia in it, too. Curiously, thankfully, the encyclopaedic noise in MacCarter’s mind produces such glittering aesthetics. In the poem ‘A Lime Rickey by Jamaica Bay’ he seems to be making a sort of aural calligraphy in 'towering ampersands of sound'. He follows this line with what I’d call yet another surreal analogy of his poetics: 'or tight enormous swans draping sparkle on the troposphere'.

The title is beautifully apt, and not as straightforward as it seems. Night sounds differ by what makes them and where they are made. Jane Routh wanders along a path between memory and memorial, giving us a tapestry of precise, meticulously ordered images.

At one point she warns us of the gap between the poem and the actuality:

What you write about your life displaces remembering: instead of memory’s murky mutability, the conviction of the printed word.

(‘All summer long’, 52)

But her attention to detail distracts us from this caution. ‘There is a Place’, she says

where the cuckoo still calls until the light fades in the cool green of the evening woods where last year’s barley stubble studded through with field pansy, daisy and storksbill where larks still pin a cascade of notes to the sky plummet earthwards and disappear into silence

(24)

Other poems reflect more of the night sounds we hear outdoors. There are owls, a lost echo of one killed on the road, another who

would settle above the open window

between the evening’s preparations and the business of the night and shriek

(‘All summer long’, 52)

Swallows add their splee-plink as they leave Cairn Holy (33); there is the wind in the pines and the silences of no wind, many silences with that particular quality of the night outdoors where silence is not the absence of sounds but the space between sounds.

Some of the silences are inherited from the past. Someone was evicted from the house whose stone foundations are barely visible, and the place where the wife would have turned for her last look is clear from the path. Some left quietly. Others not:

But on my mother’s side,

Swing Rioters: they were having none of it, ...                                   Taken into custody and tried in the assizes, next stop should have been Van Diemen’s Land – yet not: too lame, too weak to bother with.

(‘The blackberries’, 16-17)

And there are the indoor night sounds, the creaks and cracks of an old house, of one’s own ‘Body’, 'not diagrams but breakdowns / (your own and each other’s)' (44).

There are old things that make their own sounds, alerting us to what they represented to the past. An ‘Elegy for a book’ recalls the urgency (in 1974) to know everything there was to know about hedges:

Which of elm or thorn hedges

linnets or bunting prefer, now of no odds: all those miles of surveyed hedgerows lost. ...

the welter of facts

you thought you needed to know, adding to the fools’ gold weight of nostalgia you hoard.

(15)

There is old furniture – odd fragments of childhood, but places are recalled more easily than people – a concrete poem of an old coat – and beyond place, there is past time, and old friends. Throughout most of the book, Routh seems to be carefully stitching together a tapestry of night sounds, carefully curated and examined in detail so that they form a natural history of her world, as it is now and as it came to be. And it is peaceful: most of the feeling that one gets from reading the collection – especially rereading it in one sitting – is that it is a diary of going gently [sic] into that good night. Death is one of the night sounds we hear as we lie awake in the house, or sense from being in the woods of an evening.

The quiet is exploded violently in two sections of the book, however. ‘Untitled poem’ (34) begins:

Eyes on the stainless blade one millimetre from finger ends, white crescents with their mottled rind falling in rows

The poet specifically says this is not another poem about marmalade; it is a poem about grief, and her father’s death. It goes on, 'Bitter juice tempered with salt' and ends with a neighbour 'asking if I could let her have his empty jars'. Hardly peaceful this, and the immediately following poem (‘Tap tap    tap tap tap’) continues

We muffle the dead with our monuments but still they keep up a quiet tapping on the lid

and segues into instructions for cutting wood and catching 'the full speed of the blade'.

The final poems present an owl beneath 'January first-quarter moon / birch-gleam lightly chalked on the night' (p. 55), waiting in hunting mode – a system at peace. But then the immediately next poem shouts a warning against the fungal spore Hymenoscyphus fraxineus – wind-borne, death to ash trees, and quite possibly an early representative of similar diseases. The following poem, ‘Wind and woods,’ starts with a high wind (unusual among the other poems’ relative tranquillity) and ends with the spores moving across the woods

to re-settle their invisible deadliness on the clean new leaves of a sapling ash – a self-seeded adventurer which had been     heading for the sky

(58)

The quiet we have been travelling through is completely disrupted by deaths, one in the past and one in the future. But surrounding them, there is a history of life mindfully tended, appreciatively lived, and lovingly presented.

This is a book with two identities: it is an independent, stand-alone collection of English-language poems, and it is a ‘transcreation’ or ‘translation’ of Sasquatch, a separate collection of Irish- and English-language poems by Gabriel Rosenstock. Rosenstock is referenced by title, but not quoted, and this collection is a bit like a poem based on an ekphrastic poem but with no picture. (More of this later.)

On its own, Bell’s book is an engaging and poignant history of a sasquatch. Like her precursor, she is presented (7)[1] as the last of the species, one step away from extinction:

last night

a sasquatch drowned –

none of her kind remain

to mourn her

Two pages later, ‘she knows / she too will disappear, / just not how / or when / or why’. Unlike her precursor, she is female, and this change makes Bell’s sasquatch an entirely new being – unique in in her environment and at one with her world:

I am the wind blowing

Blowing Wind

I am the rain falling

Falling Rain

I am the pine sighing

Sighing Pine...

I am the silence gathering

Gathering Silence

the silence without

the silence within

(64)

Solitary, but not lonely. The male sasquatch – going by Bell’s comments (interview cited in her website)  and the nine-page interview with Rosenstock appended as an acknowledgement in this book – is a symbol of extinction, acutely aware of his isolation and his unique loneliness. By my reading, Bell’s female experiences nothing of the sort.

For starters, most of the poems use imagery associated with the feminine. Regeneration:

picking the last flowers

in the woods

the last sasquatch knows

they’ll come again –

foxgloves

(41)

or

what are they saying,

the northbound geese,

in one loud voice?

do they seek another realm?

have they found it?

is this what they proclaim?

(37)

or

early morning

and the world is nothing

as she waits

it recreates itself

from wisps

(30)

Many poems reference the moon:

moonlight on the sea –

in the milky light

the scent of her mother

(23)

and we are told that:

clouds bleed

earth darkens

the sasquatch bleeds too

seals the wound with cobwebs

how does she know to do so?

light leaches from the sky

memory fading

(46)

Also, our sasquatch is thinking as an individual, not as a species, and she is speaking as an ageing, aware woman, no more and no less. Her extinction is the personal extinction we experience in our own death. Look at how much of her world involves the moon, water, vegetation, seeds – images that carry the idea of return, of a cycle. Reading the poems and re-reading them, I can’t separate her from hope and the possibility of renewal or rebirth – totally different from the male sasquatch, who (without my seeing the original) sounds like a primordial Eeyore trapped in existential despair.

But this throws us back into the matter of acknowledgement and relationship. Once upon a time, either the phrase ‘inspired by’ or ‘with apologies to’ indicated a poet’s use of someone else’s work as a creative jumping-off point. (‘Inspired’ still works for me, though apologies don’t ever seem to be in order for an artistic creation.) In this book, Bell acknowledges her debt by calling her poems both ‘transcreation’ and ‘translation’. The former word hasn’t made it to the OED yet, but various online definitions, most from business sources, consider translation the verbatim transfer of text and transcreation something more creative, resulting in a Version Two that walks, talks, and feels as nearly as possible to Version One.

On information given, I’m not convinced either word is relevant here. ‘Transcreation’ is widely used in advertising to refer to producing a new product [sic] in Language Two that has the same audience effect as an original product in Language One. It includes context, emotional effect, all the nuances traditionally seen as going into a successful literary translation – as opposed to a machine rendering à la Google Translate, and maybe the new word is simply a response to a change in meaning of the old word ‘translation’. Outside this book, I haven’t been able to find anything discussing the concept with respect to poetry. To talk about ‘transcreation’ I think we need to see Rosenstock’s two-language original sasquatch alongside Bell’s English-only one and compare the two Englishes with the Irish. Otherwise, the topic doesn’t seem strictly relevant, and to bring it in diminishes the present book.

This is in no way a weakness of the loneliness of the sasquatch, which is a readable and attractive collection. It stands on its own, and doesn’t need a discussion of poetics to seduce us with its lovely language and its visionary central character whom we leave (very much part of the world) in the final poem:

clouds shifting across clear blue water

draw her away

away from this life

away from herself

away

into blue silences

silences which stretch over silences even bluer

to breaking point

the blue plane of her spirit dancing in the water

in the sky

(70)

What does it mean to experience and to know Country? In her new collection, Yuiquimbiang, poet and environmentalist Louise Crisp asks us to look closely at the specificity of the country around us, to engage with it in ways which challenge both our understanding of the environment and of ourselves in relation to it.

Like the engagement with Country itself which Crisp proposes, this book demands close and committed attention, a willingness on the part of the reader to go with the poet across sometimes difficult and confronting terrain. ‘The only way I know to write is to walk. I came down through the granite boulders to the river,’ Crisp writes in ‘Walk’ (3). These poems will take the reader who is willing to follow over boulders, to lake edges, across degraded landscapes, into the beauty of blossom and bird across seasons in a poetics of movement and inhabitation.

‘Yuiquimbiang,’ Crisp tells us, is a Ngarigu word, initially misheard and transformed into the Europeanised ‘Eucambene.’ Already we have a clear sense of the poet’s desire to return to the disrespected and almost silenced languages and ways of seeing of first Australians – as well as an interest in peeling back complex linguistic, social and natural histories as suggested by the use of particular words. This creates a layering, dizzying effect as we begin to contemplate the relationship between place and its naming – and how the very act of naming might either acknowledge or colonise whatever it is that is being drawn into language.

A collection profoundly interested in place and human relationship with place, Yuiquimbiang focuses on the particularities of two geographical areas – the Monaro / Snowy River region and East Gippsland. In the Preface, Crisp notes that this collection is part of a wider project which links to her other works, and that in it she is seeking to forge a hybridity of content and style, ‘an ecopoetic form that integrates political essay and environmental poetics' (p. ix). The poems – or perhaps ‘pieces’ – involve a combination of genres: poetic description of place and its specificities, using a range of traditional poetic techniques of image, line, repetition; more geographical / naturalist language which provides different kinds of taxonomies for what is being observed; a personal, reflective voice; the quoted voices of historical settlers / colonisers; the list; the government report; the essay and its note-taking. This movement between styles, genres and voices creates a collaging effect designed to destabilise and thus to potentially re-align the reader to Country in new ways. It embodies the idea that Country is multifactorial, both laterally, in terms of its complexity of elements, as well as vertically in terms of how we understand it through time and shifts in context.

The series ‘Monaro Lakes’ (8) works its way, basin by basin, across the water spaces of the Monaro. The sub-poems which constitute the series ask the reader to consider each lake or lagoon separately – ‘Coolamatong,’ ‘Kiah,’ ‘Myalla,’ ‘Avon’ etc. – in effect, to pause in our reading of Country. The shifts in layout and style highlight the need for each to be experienced in their specificity, from descriptions such as:

the rim of the lake is at the edge of the sky where the land falls away into the Snowy Gorge

(8)

to

The edge of lake shore a fringe of Crown land ‘Un-alienated land’ – Un/          claimed for sailboats in the 1880s

(10)

or

Little white bird feathers decorate the edges of iridescent green slime beyond the shoreline where a rare stand of tall sedge

with edible tubers Bolboschoenus caldwellii was recorded by Benson

twenty years ago when water last filled the Monaro lakes

(15)

This destabilising and decolonising approach to relating to Country is further explored in the beautiful and meandering poem ‘Grasses’ (29), which again focuses on the importance of specificity in order to best comprehend the world round us. ‘Even the smallest of creatures carries a sun in its eyes,’ the epigraph tells us, and this focus on particularities is echoed across the criss-crossing channels of stanzas – ‘silver fish,’ ‘old dog asleep in the shade,’ ‘1848: Hickey’s Crossing.’ As expectations are broken down, a movement between human and Country is initiated, facilitated by poeticised perception and a willingness to listen to alteric languages both within and outside the human:

Full moon goes down at dawn over the curve of Monaro grasslands Animate, inanimate the mountain moves around the country keeping an eye on things Spirit has its own song ear to the ground and its name: water You bring no fish I send no poems respecting each others’s bodhichitta

(30)

The poem ‘Podocarpus Berries’ (26), a long form, ‘prose’ poem, is one of the collection’s more overtly personal explorations. Walking and camping with her ill sister into the Snowy country, the grief and fear associated with sickness is re-understood, re-managed perhaps, in the context of engagement with the natural world:

... The full moon rose and crossed late towards Mt Twynham. My sister barely slept, facing the damp air, her lungs filled with moisture. In the morning, splashes of red like handfuls of Podocarpus berries fell from her mouth among the heath. (27)

A word, an image may be able to reshape our apprehension of ourselves and how we are always and already entwined with the world of growing and dying things

In the final section of the book, Crisp turns her gaze to her own home territory of East Gippsland, moving her poetic and naturalist attention through landscapes which, although familiar, continue to yield new understanding and respect for the natural spaces which we inhabit. The long sequence, ‘Wild Succession (Red Gum Plains 2011-2012),’ (67), uses the calendar of the human year as a framework in which to walk repeatedly through particular places. This framework takes the reader through the cycle of the seasons, the springtime blossoming of ‘purple Diuris,’ the repeated sightings of the ‘Bright murnong – Microseris lanceolata,’ the ‘weeping grasses Microlaena stipoides’, the rare reward of a ‘nodding greenhood  Pterostylis nutans.’ The inclusion on the poetic line of the botanical names for the plants identified serves a complex purpose: it demonstrates a degree of scientific knowledge and taxonomy as developed by humans; like all poetic strategies, it also helps the reader to slow down, to pay attention to the rich and refracting world we are looking at and moving amongst; in addition, like the eucumbene / yuiquimbiang linguistic relationship, it also suggests that there are different ways of knowing and connecting to the world, which are in turn influenced by time, place, ideologies of power. Human naming certainly has the capacity to tell us about the world that is being described; it also tells us about the time and the place of the human doing the describing and the potential for hierarchies of knowing, where some ways of relating to the world might be seen as superior to or more important than others.

As Judith Wright – another important Australian poet and environmental activist – wrote in her late poem ‘The Shadow of Fire’: ‘Human eyes impose a human pattern, / decipher constellations against featureless dark.’[1] Crisp’s work takes us a long way out into the stream of the natural world, hearing its movements, allowing us to see – as much as possible – from its own point of view, understanding more of the interweaving of human and Country in creating our interdependent histories. As humans however, our reading of the landscape is always mediated through the processes of language. Recognising this framework of intelligibility, with all its limits and its possibilities, and how it offers us ways forward into a viable inhabitation of Country, is the great gift of Yuiquimbiang.

---

[1] Judith Wright, ‘Shadow Fire: Ghazals,' from A Human Pattern: Selected Poems of Judith Wright (North Ryde, Angus and Robertson, 1990), 141.

Judith Beveridge has been an important voice in Australian poetry from the publication of her first collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987 and increasingly across the five published since that time (Accidental Grace 1996, Wolf Notes 2004, Storm and Honey 2009, Devadatta’s Poems 2014, Hook and Eye 2014). Her powerful ability to pay close attention and to evoke the specificities and the swirl of life about her has led to the production of a poetic oeuvre that speaks profoundly to the experience of being human; this is particularly the case in relation to her evocations of the natural world and the complexity of our human interactions with it.

It’s a significant gift therefore that Giramondo has produced Sun Music as a grouping of new work and existing poems selected by Beveridge. A substantial edition, Sun Music gives insight into Beveridge’s earlier work – although as the poet explains, she has elected not to include the long sequences around the life of the Buddha, from Devadatta’s Poems and Wolf Notes. The poems that are included here, although still often experimenting with dramatic voice, are therefore shorter, more tending to the lyrical, their voices and tone more readily accessible for readers either looking to revisit an already valued poet or for those coming to Beveridge’s work for the first time. The collection tracks the development of Beveridge’s evolving mastery of her poetic craft across time and provides ample justification for her position as one of Australia’s leading poets.

Sun Music is dedicated to the memory of some key influences upon Beveridge’s poetic: in addition to the poet’s beloved dog, Bandit, she acknowledges the importance of Vera Newsom, Dorothy Porter and Martin Harrison. Such an acknowledgement of these three poets reflects personal connection and loss; it also positions her work within a significant strand of Australian poetry. Speaking of Newsom’s poetry elsewhere, Beveridge noted that it was 'characterised by a meticulous attention to craft, to clarity, to directness, to rhythm, to a sparse lyrical elegance, and by a deft tonal and formal control.'[1] In many ways, these are the elements which also characterise Beveridge’s own work as she works with brevity and control to engage with the multilayered, or, as she puts it, ‘kaleidoscopic’ (p. xv) worlds of human experience. As she writes in the Introduction to Sun Music, at the core of the poetic craft is ‘the deep connection that language has with the body.’ The rhythms and pulses of the body inform the clarity across the many styles and moods of poem to be found in this collection.

Not surprisingly many of the poems over this nearly 25 years, sound and resound certain themes, as she notes in the Introduction: observations of the natural world, particularly birds; the position of animals and how people might understand them or at least recognise their fundamental alterity; bees and beekeeping; what it might mean to find a position of personal anchor or meditative sensibility; the vicissitudes of grief and love. The early poem ‘The Herons’ (p. 24), for example, highlights a moment of intersection, of sorts, between human and bird: ‘One stood so peacefully / as if it saw and heard the single / far-off, crystal note.’ When the human observers move away, the apparition of the herons, indifferent to them, can only be understood in the terms of human metaphor: ‘They were / beautiful as blue veins in the wrists of monks / fasting for perfection.’ The collection is filled with similar moments. In ‘Occasion of Snails’ (p. 45) even the less humanly appealing snail is recognised by the speaker as a life, a creature in its own right – even if inaccessible to her, even if, as a gardener, she will lay her ‘poisons’ for them: ‘They have crawled into eggshells / as if into temples, as if into light.’ In the new poem ‘Camel’ (p. 227), the poet returns to a creature who has been used thoughtlessly for human ends, metaphorised into human stories and ideologies, who can yet be recognised and addressed by the poem: ‘Camel, I wish you cool sand always under your feet. / I wish softness for your leathery mouth: hibiscus, / zucchini flowers, figs.’

The poem ‘Wolf Notes’ (p. 112) explores a more uncomfortable aspect of the recognition of the essential ‘living creature-hood’ of the non-human. Moving between an imagined ‘voice’ of the wolf / dog (‘This is the place, this is the place / I’ve ached for, pulled the chain / of a long tendon and ached for) and a human voice (‘Look, all our lives we’ve been / baiting the wrong animal, / unable to stop because they know’), the poem takes us into dark, unchartable territory. Nature, and the non-human creatures within it, are by no means merely decorative or an opportunity for reflection and transcendence; their alterity, their unknowable agendas that tug on the chains of human understanding are circled and respected by Beveridge’s observant poetic.

Themes of loss and death are evident across Beveridge’s oeuvre, whether it is in the ‘tooth and claw’ of the natural world or in the loss of childhood and loved ones. The new poems in Sun Music are perhaps particularly attuned to these darker tones in an emotional palette. In ‘Revisiting the Bay’ (p. 175), the poet pays tribute to friend and poetic colleague, Dorothy Porter. The poem begins with the elegiac line of direct address, ‘I rarely come here now, once or twice since you died,’ and goes on to re-inhabit this once shared space and experience. Grief may hold us back for a time, unwilling and unable to contemplate the emotional and literal places shared with those we have lost; the eventual ability to ‘revisit’ – ‘my vision of you on top of the windy, tussocky cliff / hurling pebbles, happy, laughing, saying blessings for us both’ – brings both a recognition of absence and a treasuring of memory. To hear Porter’s voice ‘saying blessings’ is to be sustained, even by that which is lost, and to take forward the joyousness of that friendship. Similarly in the ‘Hymnal / Wild Bees’ (p. 187) dedicated to Martin Harrison, Beveridge’s poem registers both the finality of death – ‘I’ll never hear their lingering vibrato, a mind enamored / of its own music’ – and the beauty of those patterns, that music, that honey which her own poem weaves into the future.

The title poem, ‘Sun Music’ (p. 201) is a moving remembrance of the poet’s father, a man who moved from ‘the bottled depths of his own drinking’ to using binoculars to watch shore birds, ‘filling my sights with beauty and distance.’ Structured in two voices, Beveridge initially offers us her own first person vision of this transformation in her father, watching from ‘around the coves,’ while her father, with his binoculars, began ‘searching for himself / along the cliffs’ – finding peace and intimacy through the observation of the world, much as the poet herself would come to do:

… Now, he was intoxicated by the sea, the sky, the spindrift a new spell he could steer his life by

Using the skills of the dramatic monologue honed over many poems, Beveridge counterbalances her view of father with his own view of himself and the transformation of self which has been brought about by his engagement with natural world – albeit that this can only be the poet’s imagined sense of his perception:

Now I listen as a pied butcherbird, like a jazz flautist in the trees, works on syncopated chimes and ensemble phrased, its liquid crystal voice – music from the sun.

The collection’s final and beautiful poem, ‘As Wasps Fly Upward’ (p. 229), is a variant on a line from the lamentful book of Job and is an open line reflection on the complex physiological and emotional responses to pain. Here, this is experienced by the intrusion of the natural world into the literal body of the human, such as ‘the tiny beetle [that] will veer into my left eye, / its blade-like parts meant for slicing plant tissue, / slicing my cornea.’ The experience of pain, of accident, the bite or sting, or what can go wrong within the boundaries of our own bodies, leads the poet to a contemplation of death, the cessation of the observing point of view. As Beveridge represents it here, this ‘remember[ing] / that death will come,’ is certainly disconcerting, something to keep us wakeful into a long night. At the same time, her perspective is also calm, accepting, recognising the inevitable re-incorporation of an individual back into the wider world; her listing of the ways death may come concludes:

Or perhaps, just from a build up over the years

of light, ephemeral stings –

barely noticed, no pain worth recording –

just a remote hum in a honey-vault of light,

then a smoky drifting away.

As Sun Music makes clear, Beveridge’s mastery of her poetic craft – the shaping of line, the transitions in voice, the light-touched honing of the image – deepens and enriches across her oeuvre. From her quiet and observant perspective, hers is a voice which continues to speak to us of how we live, how we continually shift between an experience of self that watches the world and one that is, in turn, watched and shaped by that world.

---

[1] Judith Beveridge’s address, Young Street Poets celebration of Vera Newsom’s ninetieth birthday in 2002: https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A20748

Of Monsters and Men: Poesis, the grotesque and defiance of the Creation Myth in Michael Aiken’s Satan Repentant

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n. (Milton 1667)

Such are the words of Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the classic verse novel that has shaped modern understandings of the devil’s character. But what happens when Lucifer grows tired of reigning in Hell? This is the question that Michael Aiken seeks to answer in his verse novel Satan Repentant. Using an impeccable wit, Aiken subverts the dichotomy between natural and unnatural, heavenly and demonic in the war between Heaven and Hell. The two forces are portrayed as two sides of an eternal battle who are not inherently good and evil, with forces willing to stoop themselves (and raise themselves) in the plight to condemn Lucifer-as-human. Aiken structures his verse novel into ‘books’ with an ‘argument’ prefacing each stage of Lucifer’s journey in homage to Milton. This forms the skeleton for an exploration into morality, religion and poesis which Aiken handles with outstanding finesse.

Satan’s decision to redeem himself in the eyes of God, and God’s decision to test Satan’s resilience by being reborn as a human child, sets off a chain of events leading to utter Armageddon. God exiles Lucifer to earth to prove his redemption by surviving as a human, 'to transcend, imagine / understand' (23). From an ecopoetry perspective, earth is merely the stage on which this drama unfolds. Aiken does, however, use natural imagery to distort his heavenly players and juxtapose them with demonic agents: Beelzebub commands his spies to 'conceal that hideous loveliness / beneath a Gregorian cloud' (18); meanwhile Satan retreats from God’s 'awful grace, headed / for some tree or stone' (24). Nature serves all manner of purposes from refuge to veil to a medium with which angels and demons alike terrorise young Lucifer-human.

While Satan becomes Lucifer-human, angels and devils alike plot to sabotage his earthbound journey: angels don’t want him in Heaven, and the devils want their Prince back to punish his insolence. From haunting the child-Lucifer from the shadows, to possessing trees and his human companions, nature and humanity are pawns in this divine game of chess. As Beelzebub plots a way to foil Satan’s plans to redeem himself, he seeks counsel from the 'virtuoso of sadism' (60). In a damning portrayal of Teresa of Calcutta, the cultural icon is reduced to an abject, 'outgrown and monstrous' form. The shattering contrast of natural, maternal imagery with the horrid monstrosity of Teresa’s ‘true form’ throws into question the preconceptions of her nature:

her tentacled mouths consume the souls of babies born starving to unliveable homes

This portrayal references longstanding criticism of the supposed saint, of which the most prominent critic is Dr. Aroup Chatterjee who describes Teresa of Calcutta as 'a medieval creature of darkness' (Sherwood, 2016). Rather than a saint watching over the plagued masses here Teresa is 'ministering over near-death victims', leading innocents to their doom. Aiken uses the shock of grotesque to construct a powerful moral criticism of the nun and her philosophies.

The unrealistic perfection of Heaven and the hypocrisy of Hell are thrown into the spotlight in Aiken’s divine comedy of errors. Likewise, Aiken’s image of God is akin to that of Milton’s despotic, authoritative figure. As more angels fall from Heaven, God appears more impotent despite his immense power, a king with no subjects. As a foil to God, Beelzebub presents a vindictive leader who loses followers almost as swiftly. The charges of Heaven and Hell defect from their leaders, seeking 'some third way' (93) from the binary of good and evil. Beelzebub, thinking the manipulation of Lucifer-human into murder reveals his true nature, considers himself triumphant. However, the pig-king’s tactics mirror earlier manipulations by heavenly forces, which he condemned as 'unclean methods' (86). As Lucifer-human poignantly observes, Hell is simply a reflection of Heaven’s flaws.

Lucifer-human’s plunge into poesis serves as his dowsing rod into the human condition. Channelled by his forays into 'wilderness and isolation' (69), Lucifer-human comforts himself with his imaginings. Poetry grants Lucifer-human the confidence to 'unsay / you, or you, or Him' (81). Art becomes Lucifer’s own world, but one that he quickly becomes dissatisfied with in his later adulthood. The conclusion that Lucifer-human reaches from his small-scale creation myths and his encounters with angels and fiends, is to reject the whole of it. Lucifer-as-human takes to the street to proclaim his message to humanity – and to us, as readers:

'... Make it

today. Make it your life. Do without God, You no longer need an after-life, for you are here.'

(98)

That is, to cease sacrificing our happiness for a promised land, to embrace the life we currently have, and to reject a God that 'doesn’t have / what he gave away, and he gave us all this life!' It is a roaring anthem for a secular humanism, but one that is ultimately cut short when the barriers between worlds are wrenched down.

Lucifer faces his final moments as a human, a flawed creature of earth, not shirking away from his suffering or his own crimes. Ironically, it seems that Teresa of Calcutta’s plans for the human Lucifer have reached fruition: 'Make them think it noble / to rot in bed while the world lives on' (61). Estranged from Hell, and swearing himself against God, Lucifer embraces his newfound mortality by starving himself to death. Lucifer-as-human rejects his original deal with God in the face of his own impending death. Echoing his Miltonian predecessor, Lucifer spites God’s offer: 'I reject Hell; I reject Heaven; I reject you' (121). Lucifer sees in God his own flaws, finding him unworthy of granting the redemption he originally sought.

Torn asunder by the cosmic battle, Earth is reduced to a barren battlefield. All resemblance to the lush wildernesses of Lucifer’s youth is lost. Lucifer, now a purgatorial angel, observes a 'sea / of mud, horizon to horizon bare spires ejecting / through pools, craters, pits and vesicles' (127). The final feud leads to Jesus usurping his father and, perhaps the most gruesome moment of all, wearing his father’s visage as skin-armour. Much like his portrayal of Teresa, Aiken’s Jesus is a sharp detour from the benevolent, pacifist figure of modern Christianity. Jesus is an autocratic perfectionist 'seeking cracks to criticise' (131), who would rather see no earth at all than an imperfect one.

The chilling final moments where Jesus unspeaks the world, the universe, and all Creation speaks to the fragility of life at the mercy of an apathetic master. Much like a frustrated poet balling up papers, Jesus’ erasure of all existence is at once an utter cataclysm and a muted pathos. What Aiken’s Lucifer stands for is not a creation – both earth and art itself – that is too perfect to exist, but an imperfect attempt at it. Life and art, like Lucifer-human, has value as 'something that always will be having been' (140). The human life Satan experienced may have been imperfect and full of suffering, his drive for art unfulfilled, but its having happened remains. This life cannot be taken away, even as Jesus unspeaks himself. That, like the language Lucifer-human strove so hard to master, speaks for itself.

References Milton, J. 1667, Paradise Lost, University of Adelaide, retrieved 12/03/2019, eBooks@Adelaide database. Sherwood, H. 2016, ‘Mother Teresa to become saint amid criticism over miracles and missionaries’, The Guardian, retrieved 12/03/2019.

‘The poetics of stone predate / writing: precise angles redeem its schism from the earth.’ These lines, from the poem ‘Ashlar’, could be read as summative of Annamaria Weldon’s monumental new collection, which explores how human beings, like the landscapes and civilisations that shape them, comprise strata of history and prehistory in ever-shifting relations. More than that, the collection asks how a poetic engagement with place can restore connections, like flint sparking in the darkness, to what has been lost.

Stone Mother Tongue begins with a literal return to homeland, or a land that was once home. Sighting her ‘birthplace’, Malta, from the air, the speaker remarks in ‘Incoming’ that ‘you’d miss it / unless I told you look, there!’ What follows is that exhortation to look, for reader and speaker alike. It is a looking, moreover, across vast temporal expanses: the collection’s three parts – also included are a prologue, an epilogue, a glossary of terms, and contextual notes – ambitiously explore Malta’s abundant Neolithic and Phoenician ruins from the vantage of the present day. We witness these excavations, and the narratives – human and divine – to which they allude, through the eyes of a speaker yearning for a renewed connection to her ancestors, and to her ancestral former selves. This lyric-narrative purpose, its ‘poetics of stone’, is exemplified in the title poem, which addresses one of the country’s more famous stone-age carvings of a goddess of worship  (deities of this period, the author explains later, appear to have been almost exclusively female):

Neolithic Venus, have you waited millennia for me to be your voice … ?

As much an anthropological or archeological study as a work of art, Stone Mother Tongue harnesses a rich lexicon borrowing from multiple disciplines, roots, and ages: ‘brecciated’; ‘coracle’; ‘chined’; ‘chthonic’; ‘murex’; ‘Marram grass’. The result is sonically and rhythmically exquisite, if at times forbidding. Where Weldon counterbalances this experimentation with diction, however, is in the elegance and tensile control of her syntax. Here is the beginning of ‘Paper, Ink, Inkstone, Brushes’:

There’s a forest like an inkstone hunkered as memory shouldering cobalt skies streaked with white brush-strokes sloping to headlands of lamp-black at rest on a parchment sea.

Throughout the collection, the limited use of caesura and a preference for the long, run-on sentence lends to these poems an almost wave-like urgency of movement. One feels, given also the repeated references to liminal zones, thresholds waiting to be crossed – ‘I remember that my strength is in the slow making / of a threshold' (‘A Convergence’) – a drifting in music across these thresholds: of time, of space, of memory, of what is to be made of those memories in the present.

One of the virtues of the first two parts of the collection is how they alternately highlight and suppress the personal narrative. Wary of cultivating a relationship of overt, perhaps undesirably obvious symbolism between objects and viewer, Weldon offers in these sections enough autobiographical context to justify the speaker’s project, and to clarify the nature and urgency of that project for the reader, but no more. Instead, it is through poems invoking the ancestors – what they did and what they felt and what they thought and believed – that we appreciate the immensity here of summoning, needing to summon, the past. From ‘Incantation to the Monument Builders’:

You who split earth open with fire, chined the wounds with water, listened to Her voices: limestone cutters, miners, sawyers, masons, quarriers ...

we are grateful

for your talents, celebrate their holdfast nature, cherish our island testament to adamantine glory.

The work done in Parts One and Two is complicated somewhat by Part Three: ‘Anthropocene, Antipodes’. As its title suggests, this section moves us from ancient Malta to present-day Australia, and this transition can jar. One reason for the jarring effect concerns the collection’s length: some ninety-five pages (including photographs and interludes) have elapsed before we reach Australian shores. While the strength of that work is formidable, the likeness of certain poems to others in terms of subject matter may have warranted some judicious omissions. At the same time, the relative brevity of ‘Anthropocene, Antipodes’ means that while an attempt is made to integrate the speaker’s foregoing experiences into life at home, to round out the narrative, this attempt feels less than fleshed out. But perhaps this is the point: to live not yoked to one’s points of origin, but inflected by them, and to hear in these inflections an affirming music. In ‘Exultation’, the speaker witnesses birds swooping for prey: ‘Then suddenly grace came as quiet flight … ’

Stone Mother Tongue is a testament to poetry’s capacity to marry rigorous scholarly inquiry with inquiries, no less rigorous, into the deepest recesses of personhood.