It’s a familiar dilemma. How do you express mystical or ecstatic states, states that significantly diverge from our ordinary sense of the world, by means of everyday language? 'The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way', warns the very first statement of the Tao Te Ching, just to put us straight right from the word go! Language by nature is fundamentally unequipped for the task since, in order to function, it has no choice but to carve up the seamless totality of reality into discrete objects and events, and to express a welter of simultaneous happenings as a linear series like a story, in which one things happens after another in plausible but distorted sequence.

Moreover, it’s not just our talk. As Rilke pointed out in the eighth of his Letters to a Young Poet, the whole fabric of our experience shuts us off from non-ordinary reality: 'The fact that human beings have been cowardly in this sense has done endless harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions", the whole of the so-called "spirit world", death, all these things that are so closely related to us, have been so crowded out of life by our daily warding them off, that the senses by which we might apprehend them are stunted. To say nothing of God.' We have two options, it would seem. Either we become like the Zen monk Gutei, who simply raised a finger in silence when asked about what he had learned, or we try, like Kit Kelen, to radically remake language, a project that runs the risk of reducing mysticism to simple mystification.

His latest book is actually a pocket-sized catalogue, accompanied with Chinese and Portuguese translations, specially produced for an exhibition of poems, paintings and photographs held in Lisbon last year. Its primary orientation is to go 'where no word would' (87). Given the fact that he has lived in both the People’s Republic of China and in the former Portuguese colony of Macau, Kelen may have come into contact with Taoist ideas. Certainly, as the title of this latest collection of 33 mainly shortish texts suggests, the natural world so central to the philosophy of Tao is vital to his experience of the numinous, and it may be that the visual images – many of them inspired by natural forms and colours – are intended to reinforce the point that language can only take us so far.

The collection’s title poem opens the book, and it introduces us to some of Kelen’s most characteristic gestures, including alliteration, sound play, quirky diction, and occasional surprising shifts in word-class – Gerard Manley Hopkins and/or e. e. cummings would appear to be important influences. Here is the opening segment (the title also serves as the first line):

of bright birds, dull of leaves caught light with sunshine sown a welcoming — of wind, of cloud, of constellation as from the vast of days it isn’t the eye alone to see, to steady with the sky they stand tattooed, leaf shone exalt a puzzle of bark to read past weather breakfast in branches          honey in the highest count them, lose yourself this way this is the tree where possum learned climbing and came to grief trees of the swing where we killed hours if I could reach like this I’d be rich wings dip and lift in quilting light and everything with tail and twitch comes under spell of lichen, moss and catch the fruit that’s falling be hat upon trudge, crook head to the tilt ...

(9)

The conspicuous oddities of grammar and diction here – inspired by the attempt to evoke a new world for us – jolt us out of our 'conscription' to language and its habits. Sometimes this works well, as in 'a puzzle of bark to read past weather' and 'wings dip and lift in quilting light / and everything with tail and twitch / comes under spell', but at other times his testing of the limits of expression is not so easy to follow – I’m still scratching my head over 'be hat upon trudge'. He can get a bit mannered at times, too. The phrase 'as from the vast of days' is a rather windy abstraction: the long-drawn-out stressed vowels in 'vast' and 'days' sound impressive, but they don’t add much to the overall meaning.

Having introduced his tree theme in such hectic terms, Kelen then proceeds in the rest of the book to an elaboration of its mystical and ecstatic aspects. One of the most successful instances is the poem 'where was I':

when the tree became me mid-flight, like an arrow’s twang the arrow, too, is tree              was, will be we sing and point the sky in rising neither fall but the moment’s all time felled where was I taken root and branch efflorescences of wing lit grub got am I so swayed but a breeze is limb where was the instant green became me danger was outrun because I took the tide to heart and made a moon my mood and meant where no word would ashen I bent to turn the man where?      where was I just then?

(75–76)

For a brief time, the speaker enjoys a moment of being-tree. Kelen again tries to approximate the singularity of this experience by trying to force language out of its normal patterning. Short phrases are jammed together in defiance of grammatical rules – 'where was I / taken root and branch / efflorescences of wing lit / grub got' – in order to convey a sense of profound disorientation. In addition, double-meanings proliferate. Does 'but the moment’s / all time felled' mean that the moment was the only thing that time felled, or does Kelen also want us to read it as saying that the moment is the entirety of time, felled in one swoop? The verb 'swayed' is similarly double-jointed, implying that the speaker has somehow been talked into letting go of his human form (to sway = to persuade or influence somebody to believe or do something) and now moves in a manner natural to a tree in the wind (to sway = to swing back and forth). Further on, 'limb' is both a human body part and a major branch, while 'green became me' and perhaps also 'I took / the tide to heart' invite multiple interpretations. Even 'ashen' may be read two ways, as the pale complexion of a man still reeling from the shock of his transformation, and as the condition of being an ash tree. Certainly, 'where was I' is a tour de force, in which the manipulation of syntax and polysemy verges on the violent.

Thanks to these two poems, we now have a better idea of what Kelen’s mystical understanding involves: a sense of being welcomed into a more inclusive order; an identification with the natural world; a loss of self; timelessness; and a strong sense of safety, in which 'danger is outrun'. To put this into poetic language, as we have seen, he makes use of jagged syntax, ambiguity, and sound play. This is quietly complemented at times by a regular religious vocabulary (church, heaven, souls, prayers, resurrection, grace, gods, blessing), but it is primarily these devices that enable him to capture something of the excitement and unfamiliarity of such states. Although there are hints of joy and awe, the dominant note is one of spasmodic agitation. At the same time, the breakdown of syntax largely precludes any coherent formulation of the meaning of such experiences, and this, to quote from his book-length study Poetry, Consciousness and Community, works against 'the need to make difference so as to make the world and life liveable' (87). Finally, nature is depicted in strikingly general terms. Despite the assertion of oneness with trees and birds, almost nothing appears in the texts with any vivid particularity: the trees are generic trees, the birds are generic birds – and the same goes for the lichen, moss, and sky.

The majority of the poems in up through branches are short ones. On the whole, these make use of the same techniques as the longer poems, and many of them deal with the same mystical subject matter. In 'what bird is that?', Kelen’s apprehension of transcendence is given in perhaps its most compact and accessible form:

we wish past naming invents itself from foliage, light no knowledge mastering its of-a-kind no rule-belonging to be sung drunk on being high on here this one best knows itself by flight

(107)

The main elements of this view are the yearning for a state that goes beyond names, language, knowledge, and law. Here, a sense of self no longer exists. Instead, grammatical subjects fall away, just as Kelen’s phrase 'invents itself' omits any pronoun referring to the bird. The state is also characterised by simple metaphors of intoxication ('drunk') and elevation ('high'). The invented compound-word 'of-a-kind' is meant, I believe, to echo the idiom 'one of a kind', and ingeniously increases the conceptual tension between linguistic and intellectual generalisations on the one hand, and a recognition of the absolute uniqueness of every single thing in the universe on the other. Typically, Kelen again resolves the poem with an ambiguity: the bird’s flight through the air is also, it is implied, a fleeing from fixed identities and cast-iron definitions.

In some of his other shorter poems, Kelen shifts his attention to everyday topics – a cup of tea, childhood, a honeyeater feeding from a banksia flower, gum trees transplanted to London’s Kew Gardens ('you won’t see the seasons in them') – but even here, his riddling, elusive style persists. What the style assumes is that the linearity of the English language, built around noun-things set in motion by verbs, is a limitation that needs to be bypassed. Many writers of poetry sense this restriction. In the latest issue of foam:e, for example, Elaine Leong composes lines such as 'totakea breathwhenitis sowarm-ing / likeabeehiveswarm-ing' to counteract the linear aspect of linguistic convention. This is not necessarily motivated by mere tricksiness; as Alan Watts reminds us in Tao: The Watercourse Way, 'a universe of mere objects is objectionable' because it justifies us in the notion that the world is here to exploit. Nevertheless, I think Kelen runs the risk of equating this breakdown of the limitations of language with a breakthrough in terms of our understanding of reality, a confusion that locks his approach into a fundamental destructiveness. The transgression of (merely) linguistic limits does not, of necessity, bring us any closer to mystery. At the same time, far from forcing the reader to abandon logic and rationality, his delight in such puzzles actively engage them. In fact, we are made to become more – not less – intellectual in the reading process in order to make sense of riddles such as 'invents itself' and 'of-a-kind'.

It should be evident from what has already been said about Kelen’s poetry in up through branches that he generates most of his more striking poetic effects from elements difficult to reproduce in another language. Proof of this is provided by the Chinese versions. Most of the wordplay in 'where was I' disappears in the translation by Jo, You Chengcheng and Cui Yuwei. The phrase 'but the moment’s / all time felled' is simplified to 'but this moment / is eternally felled' (or 'is felled by eternity') [但此刻 ／ 被永遠砍去]. The ambiguity of 'am I so swayed' becomes 'do I sway like this?' [我就這樣搖曵嗎], with the verb yiu yai referring to the movement of a branch or the flickering of a light. And the phrase 'green became me' is rendered as 'there the new green / turned into me' [那裡的新綠 ／ 變成我], with no sense of the possible English sense of 'green suits me'. In other words, the Chinese opts for clear meaning and commonsensical approximations in place of the writer’s ambitious innovations.

Even gentle Taoism has an aggressive aspect: 'Exterminate the sage, discard the wise, / And the people will benefit a hundredfold' (Tao Te Ching, Chapter Nineteen). It is perhaps precisely this aspect which encourages Kelen to engage in 'boundarywork' beyond discursive limits. However, the resulting violence to language committed in pursuit of this ideal can become a fixed style in its own right rather than a fluid, endlessly nuanced response to mystery. We live in an age that equates difference with newness and strangeness, and virtually all experimentation in poetry adheres to this view, so it is not surprising to find such a wild push towards experiment in up through branches. But why not experiment with a greater directness instead? Alan Watts reminds us in his book on Taoism that its main emphasis is on 'remarkable naturalness' and 'uncontrived skill'. Language, too, has its Tao – its spontaneities and extraordinary modes of fluency – and an excessive working against its grain is likely to produce more friction that illuminating fire.

This revelatory collection, Feminist Ecologies, brings together the incendiary and dynamic Leadership of Australian ecofeminists to an increasingly urgent field of analysis. This is not my field, I have no authority in it yet I appear (and am thrilled to) within its pages – along with the women I worked with on the Climate Guardian Angels.

There’s a dissonance to how I come to launch this book that I want to reflect on, because having the opportunity to engage with this deeply tendentious theoretical advocacy, goes some way to holding in tension, bringing into synthesis, the dialectic[1] of our academic and activist lives – competing and harried as they are. Because I’m struck that I never see colleagues at a blockade nor comrades at a conference. They can sometimes feel like worlds apart. Yet we’re all standing at these sites of intervention on our tippy toes, sharing a hankering for revolution, which we all know is now inevitable from sharing the same critical traditions. Revolution is already unavoidable since decoupling the economy from carbon is so fundamental a shift in the relations of production.[2] What this collection illuminates, is how as Marx said, ‘The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’[3] These are long since contended ideas beset with gendered dualisms, yet they are worth revisiting at this juncture, particularly the notion of Praxis. Reviving Praxis is perhaps the foremost imperative of this collection.

We bear witness in the pages of this book to ecofeminism as a shining example of Praxis.[4] Australian women scholars in the 1970s and 80s established an unparalleled leadership in the nascent international field of environmental humanities because of our particularly ‘glocal’ scenario of colonial dispossession and resource extraction. Drawing on notions of Aboriginal guardianship, it was a theory oriented toward change, combining critical thinking with action through what Alison Bartlett dubs an ‘epistecology’.[5] In their daily lives they occupied sites of protest that themselves involved ‘bodies of thought as well as thinking bodies’ (156).

They enacted praxis as a theory of action, enabling participatory democracy. For those of us who stand in their wake we are now past welcoming change, past seeking change, past petitioning for change – we are ready now to force change.

We need a course of action such as this collection strategically expands. One that is situated, ‘ecologically embodied’, (109) and materialist. One that critiques capitalist patriarchy by recognising, unlike Marx, the productivity of reproduction, of caring labours, housework, and in Maryse Helbert’s example, that women’s unpaid labour props up the mining industry (233) itself a ‘social infrastructure’ that is hostile to women while ‘privileg[ing] men’s economic advancement’ (243).

We need a praxis that understands that Indigenous sovereignties underpin any claim made over any place. That there isn’t any right to territory that isn’t entwined with the responsibility to care for it (198). That in land claims women landowners, as Deborah Bird Rose explains, are marginalised because of the ‘androcentric heritage of anthropology’ (85). So any alliances forged, for example, with the Wangan and Jagalingou in their fight against Adani,[6] need to work with rather than against differences within that native title group and recognise the ‘value of Indigenous management of cultured countries’ (197) such as the renewal ceremonies Ambelin Kwaymullina describes (195).

We need a praxis that avoids the dualisms and hyperseparation of human and non-human by falling into the traps of anthropomorphism, and androcentrism. One that eschews the ‘biologistic reduction of woman to womb’ that Kate Rigby describes – this ‘ensnared categorization of "woman" with "nature"' – while still being attentive to our embodied identities (175). It is the common history of oppression women, particularly first nation, share with nature through being identified with it, that has provided a basis for an ecofeminist praxis.

We need a praxis that shares Germaine Greer’s impulse toward relational thinking, as Lara Stevens describes it, that ‘conceive[s] of women’s oppression as a network or system of multiple and interlocking dominations’ (121). This will draw on a ‘ecofeminist literacy’ in its critique of toxic masculinity. It is a praxis that rethinks, as Anne Elvey writes ‘the maleness of the divine’ and the ways bible interpretative traditions have been toxic to the earth (211). It is one that works instead towards new understandings of kinship and indivisibility,[7] through forging connections between environmental and social justice. A praxis that sees nature as ‘a moral order’ as Freya Matthews writes, that entails ‘both individuality and holism’ within relational systems [8] and one to which Peta Tait attributes, ‘diverse sentience’ (177).

Ecofeminists are, as Ariel Salleh says, ‘both street fighters and philosophers’ (7). They celebrate the history of women activists, such as those described by Emma Shortis, in the remarkable campaign for a mining ban in Antarctica (253). They are refusing to be sidelined, as women, in glocal issues of energy security (246).

I’m a convert to the praxis of ecofeminists, writ large in this formidable collection. By way of sublating the dialectic of academia and activism, of finding ways to productively hold these in suspended tension, I commend this rabble-rousing collection to anyone silently weathering reef grief, reef rage and all the dystopian dread of the climocalypse. This is a collection that will doubtless become required reading on every blockade. See you there.

Relevant topics not included in this review: road romance, failures of assistance, Taylor Swift, the glibness of council preservation materials, sinkholes.

As a form of orientation, like this book, I am going to take the long way round to a shortcut.

***

In Googling I find a lack of consensus (scientific or otherwise) about what 'dingo' is, let alone the ways of. What I grew up understanding  (( – colloquially, at a distance, from the vantage of outer suburban swamps – )) as ‘dingo’ was n: the canine that is over there, out there. Dogs were the lank things panting on shaded concrete, the things that ran away and came back, the things that howled when the wind came and the gust quickened up to ominous, the things put down. Dingoes don’t bark.

The dingo-concept in invader-colonial-settler English – both casual and scientifically nomenclatural –  has been alternately named 'wolf', 'dingo', 'dog', and 'wild dog'. There is, from my Google understanding, little consensus whether the dingo is a feral or native animal, or what kinds of dogs should be classed as 'dingoes'. In its habits and history, too, the dingo itself is perambulatory, mythic in origin, always both coming and going. Wikipedia: Dingoes came to this continent somewhere between 3500 and 12000 YBP. Google: Asian seafarers brought them here. Different storytelling traditions tell different truths, singing them into creation differently.

Perhaps one day they may just leave for somewhere else. They do not particularly seek human friendship, kinship or kindness but return it in spades when they decide to. Amidst the ecological stigmas of invaders, about the right kinds of dogs, the right kinds of seeing, never has this language mapped the dingo to a point, and as that grasping continues, the point keeps moving out of sight: through interbreeding with other dog breeds, it seems that no ‘pure’ dingoes remain: all dingoes are only in some way. That is, we keep looking as the dingo obscures before us.

***

Another detour, like this book moves: I have a memory (or it has me) of being at the top of the lighthouse in Esperance as an eight-year-old child on a grey day in high wind, of vomiting over the railing and watching the matter scatter onto the rocks and sea below, before the waves rearranged it all completely out of sight. It was cold: I was wearing thick clothes. I remember little else, though it was the first time I left my suburbs, the first time I had spent hours in cars, going simply to go. Somewhere in my mind is also carsickness, crayon melting like lipstick into a rented carseat, feeling terror in a cave. Like Gerald Murnane’s re-mis-collection from his reading of Don Quixote – of wind-borne vomit splashing on the side of a ship – I have not conferred with anyone to confirm it. This memory simply is, and is true for being is, though perhaps false for being not. It is, or was, or has been, or sits somewhere on the edges of all of these. In playing it back, this was how I learned to travel. But I google the lighthouse and never find it.

When we came back from the trip, our dog was gone. She was a dog who had bitten me several times, and I did not grieve her absence particularly – I was the kind of child called sensitive in a euphemistic way – but was puzzled by it. My parents stated that she had gone to live in the country because she was part dingo (that is, dangerous, not suburban, a there not here). She had bitten me, so I accepted this with some guilt, and on some deeper level, maybe, the sense that travel and movement are a loosening inasmuch as they are a reconstruction, an addendum. You return to the suburb, the pale construct of the unchanging, to change and to changing and changed. I don’t think she was really a dingo, but in some ways dingo.

***

Track forward— I want to know more about trees.

(15)

Why am I writing about the dingoes of my life? Because this book is In Some Ways Dingo and in some ways dingo, invitational in a sort of unfussed, casual, incantory way, like both a map and the act of traversing. These are poems about what it is to wonder about space before entering it, and then to do so, and to keep wondering the whole way through. A desktop background of the RAAF Lake outside Point Cook, and the seeing and tasting of the air, and the absurdity of all of them, like travelling with someone as they fiddle with the radio or Google Maps while you focus on the road, and vice versa. These short, casual, intensely focused poems run astride Elizabeth Bishop’s call toward the close of ‘Questions of Travel’ –

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room?

(Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979, 94)

– except framed in a way peculiar to a generation reared amidst screens, a new form of movement: Paloma asks on one level, in a life with Google, what is the relationship between imagination and space? What does it mean to think about place, and know the data of it intimately without the datum of it. When the whole world is within reach, what is it to actually touch it, before and after being there? How are we dingoes at the edge of in/un/experience?

This book interrogates the dissolution of having been and not having been when the mediatised seeing corrupts the gap between fantasy and experience, something historically new. Ibsen travelled south to see the paintings he had never heard of, and was transformed. I have seen them all through a screen before the age of 25. Yet motion still exists and beckons. Maybe it’s not a meaningful distinction to say here or there unless there is a when attached. In Some Ways Dingo navigates this like a trout upstream, not against reductive logics, but straight, clean, through them.

Paloma begins with ‘Hyper-reactive’, at traffic lights in Brunswick, in the middle of the Melburnian inner north – the panoptical paradise from which many things are seen and discussed and seldom experienced (I live off Sydney Road, this isn’t a dig), but moves out relentlessly, to Esperance, Milat territory, Gippsland, everynow roadside Australia. That poem won the 2015 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and is a taut yet expansive marvel, a winning, blooming thing that establishes the themes of the book: 'one thing leads to another / until it doesn’t / active now' (3), draws together the movement through space, digital and otherwise, and the sense of being there – activity, not as a means or ends, but a language that transcends both.

This movement is never linear, but intentional, unplanned and aleatory: 'We take the turnoff at the last minute' ('Wolf(e) Creek', 32). Shoes grip puddles, hands are held on planes, wombats are warned against. Empty turned over cars are inspected, 'Itemise lives ... / ... then leave them' ('On reality TV', 31). Listing the aphorisms of movement here would be an itinerary in itself, but none of the travel here is low or lonely nor yearning for comprehensiveness, only the register of comprehension: when the speaker is isolated, it’s at a screen, scanning the opals of, looking at YouTube sinkholes, the websites of whales. How here is only ever here becoming there, first reconnaissance, then experience, mediated by the fact of doing, but all overlapping:

... me watching                            exhaling loudly … Scrolling                                      exhaling loudly

(37)

'I had only ever seen Redwoods in California but forgot to touch them' ('Periphery', 7) follows hard on touching the screen to save an image of the self to the desktop. 'Hands disappear into wood' (7), or firmament, or the self, or somewhere.

This is no mere phenomenology of space and travelling through, though. Stylistically, Paloma’s charm and wit is never far from the surface, replete and warm, with dry punchlines, never simply motion but the vexed pleasure of it, too. 'Poem' inhabits a delightful Ashbery-like humour:

It was called Blackbirds then it was called In Memory of Blackbirds but now it’s called Artificial Choir

(30)

Like the travel, the poem itself sings that 'Nothing is ever really still' (23). Indeed, reading itself has no place (Bachelard): all here moves with the same opaque tenacity of fossicking, internally and externally, for what the fossicking itself means. Underpinning the rich insight is always a vivid curious hunger for experience: the final poem 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' observes 'The kid with the bubble-o-bill / who just can’t get past his face (45): there is no end of the road, but not in an ouroboros way of a closed loop. Just the tasting of being.

To insist on a failure to capture something is to insist on an unavoidable futility instead of foregrounding the innate fragility of the thing which cannot be wholly captured. From the Lehmann Brothers to Russell Coight to everything in between, from Burke and Wills to failed present science, encounters with landscape one does not dwell on in post-invasion poetics settles things into a reductive acquisitive dichotomy of beenthere/donethat. In Some Ways Dingo patiently emphasises visions slipping and impressions accreting beyond the sum of any possible part, and parts beyond any possible sum. To be presently being is to be dingo. Sure, the dingo is out there. It has a Wikipedia page. There are approximately 21,000,000 google hits that are returned. But what is it like, and in which ways dingo? Paloma suggests both thinking and doing, both looking and searching, both deciding and not.

‘Compass Points’: a blueprint for an ecopoetic review of Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney as a disabled narrative and ongoing reading process

This interactive review can be accessed through the link above.

The poetic register is perhaps the most suitable vantage point for flight. Words (and images) are released from the page to re-form in the reader’s mind. The voice of the author becomes akin to a Sloterdijkean 'soul expansion', his or her attention travels beyond the corporeal home, and, according to the logic of an 'archaeology of the intimate', facilitates a meeting place for a 'poetics of the inhabited interior' (Sloterdijk 2011, 17–20, 83–90). There is an intimacy in such a flight, as a shared interior space opens – whereby isness is interrogated by both place and form with a kind of friendship in play, floating in an embryonic bubble – transparent, fragile, porous, animated, vital.

If all of this sounds a little too removed from a review of a slim volume of Australian poetry, then the volume in question is not fully appreciated. David Musgrave has produced a delight for the eyes, ears and mind in his book-length poem – which has as its central preoccupation, the isness of voice. A highly innovative, beautiful and scholarly work, Anatomy of Voice is both elegy and exploration, a tribute to a teacher and friend (the late Bill Maidment) and a meditation on the many connotations of voice. It is also a rather handsome addition to any library.

Musgrave explores the shifting sands of the question of voice through four structural partitions. The first comprises twenty-four poems that each include the 'ghosting' of a sequence of words in reverse that bleed through from the facing verso.  Each poem enfolds a world of voice and the world in which voice sounds, exploring the darkness that is also enfolded in its absence, a wonderful example of which opens upon the play of body and language, silence and voice, folds and fontanelles (13):

The second partition responds to (and takes flight from) several beautifully reproduced Renaissance wood-cut engravings, commencing – evocatively – with Guillaume de La Perriere’s emblem of a man trying to catch the wind with a net. This is a 'visual poem' that poignantly speaks to the tension that Musgrave explores between language and isness, between authorial intent and form, and the nature of the phenomenon of voice that continues to evade capture (50):

'Voice' is – in its nature (is it?) – rather evasive (hard to capture / complex and sonorous) and opaque (hard to see-through / orotund – from the latin, a 'rounded mouth'). It is a sphere of contestation, and Musgrave deliberately problematises any 'demand for authorial voice' (77). Who is speaking? Musgrave? Maidment? Us? No-one? Everyone? Everything? Musgrave provides a rigorous and delightful interrogation of self and speech throughout his third partition in particular, replete with echoes of poets, writers and philosophers (Eliot, Milton, St Augustine, Kafka, Beckett and many more)*, utilising footnotes in the 'voice' of his friend, lifted directly from three of Maidment’s articles from the 60s (77):

Diogenes went to the city with his lantern, his tub, his sun You went from Scone to Sydney with your Keats, your charity and wit But where are your poems now?¹³ and who is speaking here?¹⁴ Some soft thing stirring softly soon to stir no more¹⁵ __________________ 13 One may also presume, supposing the lost material analogous to the saved, that nothing of 'intrinsic literary importance’ has been lost, and still regret that loss. W.M. 14 The demand for authorial voice masks a demand for proper moral answers, imperatives or formulations; and ‘unity’ becomes a consequence of issuing the right views, of being spiritually mature. W.M. 15 Necessarily a sketch, a preliminary rough ordering, a feeler towards further work? W.M.

Of special note from an ecopoetical perspective are Musgrave’s allusions and appropriations of Country, the 'voice' of the bush, where ‘tadpoles throng’ and ‘mosquitoes fizzle’ (68), where we hear the ‘song of the nightingale on the plum-branch’ (81) and where we explore ‘river gums    silver wattle   cicada-realms’ (75). A depth of connection to Country permeates the volume, culminating in a mighty procession of 'voices' that Musgrave presents while bringing the reader along on a bush walk (78). A feast for the ears as well as the heart.

I won’t transcribe it here for the simple reason that it simply must be read in its entirety to ensure that the cumulative power of so many voices is deeply heard. I will, however, offer this suggestion: take the volume with you into your favourite patch of Earth and allow the voice of both word and world (and the interplay between Musgrave and Maidment’s worlds and your own) to be heard together. For me it was a trip to the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens in Mparntwe / Alice Springs, nestled close to the bank of the perennially dry Todd River, which was lined with majestic Ghost Gums with roots that delve deeply into the precious water flowing beneath the ground. The Gardens provide a network of walking trails that allow the visitor to enjoy over 600 arid-zone Central Australian plants and an incredible variety of birdlife.

I sat on one of the well-appointed benches in the middle of the Gardens across from a lively Western Bowerbird’s nest and allowed the voices in my own head to soften. The sound of his poiesis as well as the voices of a plethora of other birds floated into my consciousness as I took up Anatomy of Voice, enjoying both the space around me and the space offered by Musgrave’s words. As I finished reading the delightful list of bush voices which concludes with that of the kangaroo, the relative silence of my inner world was punctuated by the sound of a large Euro bounding across the path before me, startling me and causing me to lift my eyes from the page and smile deeply, offering a silent prayer of gratitude for the words on my lap and the Country beneath my feet and the way both had conspired to produce a beautiful experience in my own sphere.

The final partition of Anatomy of Voice is elegy at its finest and is worth the price of the volume for the single page of wonderfully woven words that both release and intimately bind Musgrave and Maidment’s voices. The woodcut accompanying this section is Joannes de Boria’s ‘two globes touching’ which serves to emblematise Musgrave’s central preoccupation with the isness of voice (with one element of its subject matter, the blended 'voices' of Musgrave and Maidment). In a way Musgrave’s preoccupation is recast here in relation to the intimate connection of 'globes touching' which in turn effects a shift in the focus of is-ness to (if I may intone Sloterdijk again) where-ness, to an exploration of the point at which two worlds meet and the space where two inhabited interiors are given voice.

In concluding, this remarkable book-length-poem (that incidentally begins with Beckett’s disembodied voice floating through the dark on the front facing page), Anatomy of Voice provides in its final words a fitting note whereby 'the worlds we inhabit' touch and the voice that we ‘carry in the mind’s heart’ is both ‘trace’ and ‘point on the boundaries of our selves’ (87). Mr W. M. is noted as the ‘only begetter of these ensuring verses’ (so Musgrave inscribes) and we all the richer for their birth and for the erudite and potent voice/s that is/are gifted, interrogated, and released in the pages that contain them and that subsequently give them flight.

There are two main ecopoetic identifiers used conversely by Lachlan Brown in Lunar Inheritance to draw attention to the sense of alienation the protagonist feels within an unfamiliar country and cityscape. One is in relation to the lack of harmony with one’s surroundings, and the other has to do with no sense of integration within a community. These two points are important when reading this volume from an ecological perspective. First, ecological poetics, among other things, engages with the relationship between humans and the wider environment and finds grounds upon which human and other-than-human communities can cohabit and thrive harmoniously in the biosphere. Second, ecopoetics generally seeks to support Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology which identifies everything as connected with everything else (Glotfelty, xix). The description of the narrator’s surroundings in this volume draws attention to that which is missing – in this case 'Nature' and human relationship with it. Estrangement from the natural world is highlighted by the absence of integration and harmony. By appearing to diminish the perceived value of human relatedness to the natural world as the moral principle he adheres to in his aesthetics, the reader is alerted, and recognition of that lack is ensured.

Lunar Inheritance is written from the perspective of an Australian who has Chinese heritage on his mother’s side and an Anglo-Australian father. The narrator drifts through city environs that are foreign to him, particularly Guangzhou and Shanghai, generally in search of identity. By supplanting the natural environment with the constructed one the poet is not only questioning the idea of identifying with a foreign culture or a place, but he is also obstructing any idea of rescuing humanity from the perceived post-industrial sense of alienation from its source of being. Through recognition of our shared physical existence with the natural world we can regain our own sense of identity as human beings who are corporeally embedded in a 'living landscape' and a 'deeply interconnected matrix of sensorial reality' (Abram 65, 84), notwithstanding our location or our cultural or ancestral heritage. I suggest then that social / cultural imperatives run parallel to ecological ones in this collection for a particular purpose, and overlooking the natural world is a deliberate strategy.

Because of the noticeable absence or minimal reference to the natural world in Lunar Inheritance, there is an extreme sense of disconnection: the narrator appears to stand outside of, and often in opposition to, the other-than-human world. He is not portrayed as being ecologically embedded in the world but rather somehow trapped in human constructed environments, especially cityscapes. The general mood throughout creates a sense of uncertainty and raises the question of unfavourable possibilities amid contemporary capitalism and consumerism. Surrounded by built environments, especially unfamiliar ones, the narrator reveals a sense of confusion and isolation in, for instance, the poem 'ad-venture',

Efficiency dividend the shortcut that doesn’t pay off, losing one self you’re out of data in a new-old city, building site scaffolding like bamboo hashtags camped around a high-rise. The evangelical in you wants a sign, but there are heaps of them covering everything and whatever he called it that was its name.

(54)

Brown’s interpretation of human relatedness to consumerism’s hypes and constructed environments, to the virtual exclusion of the natural ones, is unsettling.

Awe is directed towards the human-made environment rather than in consideration of the wonders of the natural world. There is no sense of the presence of something inherent that is pervading and sustaining Earth and its inhabitants in a perpetual cyclical pattern of regeneration and restoration. In Shanghai, for example, there are 'massive overpasses like fat basslines grooving / hard with pentatonic cars' ('new new Shanghai', 33). Guangzhou’s city centre is 'knotted' ('safe break', 3). The poems have the potential to engender longing for the reinstatement of Earth connectedness in the reader. Attention is drawn to the possibility of a lifeless inheritance for us all.

The absence of nature, however, is not entirely complete. There are vestiges of the natural world throughout the poems. Remnants only of lifeforms suggest the threat of extinction for both human and Other. In this volume there appears to be very little chance of recovery of the landscape in which we are embedded. One exception might be in the poem 'on Shamian island' where the narrator notes: 'Life of breath O breath of life: birdcall, / ancient trees', is a rare oasis in an otherwise 'teeming city that desires / a Kaiping billboard’s photoshopped blue skies' (20). This is as if a remnant habitat for threatened species. Birds and trees appear, albeit tentatively and fleetingly, in the poem 'curriculum vitae':

Banyan trees with limbs crosshatching whole apartment blocks,

the sky’s sketched edges

rapidly darkening,

and a day already

performance-reviewing itself,

with birds retrospectively true,

just perching there in point form.

(11)

The banyan tree is a fig, the seed of which can germinate in a crack or crevice of a human constructed edifice. It is a natural survivor in a hostile environment. The birds appear as if stunned, or as paper cut-outs. The two migrating birds in the poem 'Chinese Container' are forced to adjust to global atmospheric change (13). In the poem 'cached psalm' sparrows are caged and sold as if oddities for human entertainment (24). 'Live chickens calling from cages / like a chorus in a tragedy', are no doubt used for human consumption ('pride', 26). An anthropocentric perspective is maintained rather than an ecocentric one.

Proactive environmental awareness is rooted in consciousness, and conscience operates through the senses, the associative forces of which are feelings and emotions. Literary expressions of ethically sound environmentally conscious ways of feeling we are part of an integrated Earth, as presented in certain types of ecopoetics, could be beneficial for the progress of all Earth’s life systems. The poems in this volume are confronting, especially if the reader considers the actuality of being part of an immeasurable, expansive network of interconnection, not merely in a state of coexistence with other beings, sentient or otherwise, but as a part of living biological relationships. More often than not the narrator in Lunar Inheritance appears disillusioned, cynical and sometimes indifferent, 'left breathing in / coal dust' ('a dream about Matthew 25', 59), or imaging picking through 'our growing mountain of debris' ('failed to do', 81) on this 'warming planet' ('wall of frozen dumplings', 37).  For the most part, the poems lack hope. The reader is left with a feeling of longing for lost hope.

The poems in this volume are challenging – there is no consecutively developed story, and each poem is as if small parcels of thoughts and memories carried from one foreign environment to another. There is a suggestion of psychological disconnectedness with the cultural background the narrator has inherited. Of particular interest here is that there is no real sense of human relatedness or attachment to earth either. Rather, attention is drawn to the lack of reference to our inherent existence as part of the natural environment. The language used alerts the reader to the possibility of the threat to all lifeforms caused by unsustainable development and flagrant disregard of the earth and other lifeforms. Perhaps the most urgent function of ecopoetics in contemporary terms is to redirect human consciousness to the full attention of its position in a threatened natural world. Lunar Inheritance appears to have achieved this outcome.

true god, we really are an arterial kaleidoscope of silt-laden language.

(30)

This is a powerful and important collection of poetry. It achieves what poetry, at its very best, can sometimes do: through a marvellous crafting of the tools of language, these poems speak fully from the raw and generous heart of the poet, thereby taking the reader to the abrasive interface of self and world, the experience of the speaker and the confronting environment he finds himself in.

From 2011–2015, Hall worked as a teacher of outdoor education and camps at Borroloola, in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Fume is a homage to the resilience and richness of the community he found there – a community which adopted him into clan and family – as well as a lament and a call to action for all the ‘sorry business’ that has gone on, leaving behind an almost impossible legacy of trauma.

When Judith Wright wrote ‘Nigger’s Leap, New England’, she began to articulate the difficult position of the settler Australian in relation to the violence and dispossession perpetuated against Australia’s first peoples; as beneficiaries of that violence, how can we understand Country, or speak to the experience of the people still experiencing it? Hall’s work takes up that question, so pressing for Australia’s non-Indigenous and Indigenous inhabitants alike. How can he, ‘a middle-aged munanga’ (25)(white man / stranger) understand the landscape through which he travels or the people who live there?

In many ways, the answer to that question would appear to lie in what Hall refers to as ‘two-ways learning’ (88) – the ability to come into exchange with a willingness to listen as well as to share, to be open to new ways of understanding the world that might be profoundly destabilising. Of course, the possibilities for listening are also predicated on the generosity of the speaker and the circumstances of the sharing – such as his ‘lil-dad’ who, in a context of shared relationship, takes him to Tank Hill (22), enabling him to see country in ways he has never seen it before. In ‘Turtle Camp' (48), we see a very explicit example of this two-ways learning where Hall, as teacher, provides ‘life-cycles and health’ and ‘field work’ while the bardi bardi (older women) and even the children can teach him about the turtle’s labouring ‘rhythm’ and, in language, what it might mean for the turtle to find its ‘true home’. In the poem ‘hand (pay) back (out)’ (64), his adopted Nana Miller passes onto him the story of a similar massacre to that described by Wright – but this time conveyed within the trust and responsibility of family where he is asked to write about the ‘skulls and bones / bearing grim evidence / of the awful slaughter / enacted there' (65).

As Hall notes in his introductory essay, the ongoing suffering and the injustices experienced by the people of Borroloola became an immense personal burden as he increasingly stands with them, seeing the world from their point of view. Even being ‘family’, he ‘found living amongst so much remote and repressed trauma a dangerous thing' (17):

Out of sight and out of mind Borroloola is a bloom of asbestos and neglect even as the flag flies black for the people, yellow for the sun percolating life, and red for the rust- red country sodden in blood

(61)

The idea of ‘dark’s drag’ (36), or the ‘bony clutching / reach’ of the ngabaya (ghost) or the siren lure of the nuwalinya (mermaid) pervade Hall’s poems. On the one hand, they are motivated by powerful currents of love and connection and the desire to contribute; on the other hand, they reflect the ongoing legacies of all sorry business which has gone before and which still stalks the people in their country – beautiful and broken.

Fume rises like ceremonial smoke out of these conflicting histories and impulses. The motif of the fume suggests the continuity of culture, the specificity of place (like the ‘faint glimmer of thermal plumes’ (44) across the landscape), while also evoking the ‘toxic burn’ (66) of the mine which contaminates country, or the ‘sniffed fume’s squall’ (27) of young people’s drug problems – and perhaps even the poet’s own anger, his fuming at a history of such cruelty and his own inability to change it, to bring healing to the people he has come to love. It is a strong image which permeates the collection.

As Hall states explicitly, in some ways the writing of these poems is an attempt to ‘write myself back to health’ (20), to use the cathartic aspect of writing as well as poetry’s particular ability to evoke complexity and ambiguity in order to cast off at least some of the demons of a personal and collective past. The writing of poetry is also clearly his response to the responsibilities passed onto him by his Gudanji family to communicate not only their sufferings but the specificity of their perspective and their stories. Writing about visual art, he notes:

Painting the lagoon or river bend where your family is boss, where title is a grip of creation knowledge, closed to the outsider, this is the inherited fight, to make graphic the deeds of native- born law.

(62)

While at Borroloola, Hall initiated a poetry writing group, ‘Diwurruwurru’ or message stick, in which poems were collectively written and communicated to the wider world. Using a combination of linguistic traditions – English, Kriol, the four language groups left in the Gulf region (Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Marra) – Hall continues the practice of the message stick in his own poems. Sometimes this means he ‘receives’, as in the poem the ‘Message Stick’ (72) which brings connection to family and place while he sits, brought low, in a psychiatric ward in Darwin. Sometimes this is also the role of his own poetry – to encode and distribute insight to those who are able to listen and interpret.

What do munanga know of salutarily singing country? Of the numinous mischievously stirring strife amongst already sabotaged custodians whose kujika’s [songline] scorched? Who will tearfully sing him, big business, with millad [our] mob in the dirt, pressing forward, hoping for peace?

(59)

No wonder Hall feels nearly ‘rubbed out’ (16). In an extraordinary act of personal and linguistic courage he has taken up this challenge to restore the scorched songlines, this ‘big business’ of his Indigenous family, to ‘tearfully sing him … pressing forward, hoping for peace’. It is now our responsibility, as Hall’s readers, to listen and to learn and to respond.

Into the Green

The Conversation of Trees is Vanessa Kirkpatrick’s second poetry collection and it builds on the themes of her prize-winning first, To Catch the Light: human connection and dislocation, and the relation between the human subject and the natural world. This is a poetic of delicate observation, a gently rendered imagery which carries a reader through leaves and air, touch and breath, a listening to the ‘conversations of trees’ and an exploration of the questions of love, loss, art and empathy. Kirkpatrick’s eco-poetic and lyrical work opens up a fertile and liminal space in which to consider intimacy – between lovers, friends, a mother and her child – and where  the closely observed and felt world is recognised in all its alterity but also for what it might say to the human animal who is moving amongst it.

The poems are anchored by a sense of joy, such as is celebrated when a child comes into language, tasting the world and the word at the same time:

You chant round vowels, crisp consonants, feel the fullness of ‘apple’ purling on your tongue.

(2)

In ‘The Three Oaks’, the child’s engagement with the world and the expression of it through language is reinforced by the observations of the mother who has brought her into ‘Dodona’s grove’, this ‘deep pool / of shade beneath the oaks’. The natural world is perceived as a place of mystery, a language as yet unlearned – and Kirkpatrick frequently uses mythic tropes to reinforce this – and, in this attenuated state where the child ‘rubs her eyes / and waits for sleep’, her mother listens hard to read and to understand this radically different mode of communication:

I trace the braille of lenticles, hear leaves shuffling like pages of an ancient book. … How to net this music into words? The leaves speak only when they touch.

(14)

In the title poem, ‘The Conversation of Trees’, the poet refers to this quasi mystical state where the observer might be able to understand the language of trees – whose ‘Veins flow with verdant knowledge. / Roots delve and keen the past / while branches search far constellations’ – as ‘taking the green’. This concept can be understood literally, such as when the foal bends her head to the green clover; it can also be understood as the state in which otherness might be truly heard, the gulf between the listener and the ‘different voices’ of the trees closed as much as possible – as when the novitiate takes the veil and moves into a different relationship with the physical and the spiritual world:

Like the lowly swineherd, Caedmon, stealing from his stalls to press an ear against the choruses of monks I stand with the door ajar unknowing, yet spellbound by these strange, pure tongues and I wonder if I too might one day find the music of my soul’s flute and take the green and love entirely.

(7)

However, ‘the green’ doesn’t only bring connection; as the poet notes, ‘nature’s / dual conceits / of timelessness and change’ (16), mean that at least part of that strange music involves a recognition of loss and mortality. What is born, what constitutes the fertility of engagement between people (‘When we touch / the warmth dissolves / all edges’, 9), will also come undone – through the seasons of death and change. There are a number of poems which chronicle such loss: the lost light of childhood in ‘The Window’ (10), the long-ago moment of the death of her brother in ‘Unravelling’ (33); the poems for Rob Curtis, such as ‘The Colour of Touch’, in which the space of dreaming – the ‘one moment / the full moon lingers / on the world’s shoulder’ – is the only way to return to that lost state of connection, ‘My ear on your heart’ (52). The beautiful poem, ‘This Long Night’ takes us further into this space, dark ‘with the weight of memories’. Spread out across the page, its two parts reach and almost touch each other, weaving together these two apparently contradictory elements: the faces ‘I have known’ and the ‘oncoming tide    of anonymous faces’, 'the roots of trees,’ and the trees ‘bending    in a breeze’:

At dawn                                                   I am motionless as dark angels of regret                          enter my room their hands open                          and warm on my skin.

(47)

The longer poem, ‘Letters from Eurydice’ (57) takes up the mythic form of this trope – that art, epitomised by the lover-poet Orpheus, is almost, but not quite, powerful enough to turn back the tides of death and less. Adopting a similar voice to that used by American modernist, H.D. in her poem ‘Eurydice’, Kirkpatrick speaks from the position of the lost love – her recognition of the weariness that comes from impossible longing and the ego of the poet who, in the end, was unable to recognise her: ‘your glance has sealed my fate / and the shadows moved, only for you’ (61).

The Conversation of Trees takes us to a place which is in between, where one order of things perceives another, where fingers almost touch. This can be seen graphically in ‘Littoral’, as coast and bush almost overlap:

A salty tang drifts between the tall trunks of spotted gums. I can almost hear the leaves fall across our path. They catch the light more loudly than what you are saying through silence.

(29)

The collection’s final poem ‘Liminal’ (66) brings together the key themes of connection and transience, winter and summer, distress and peace. ‘No sooner than I touch you / with these words, we will be gone’, the poet writes, recognising both the strength and the limitations of her craft, as well as the advice which she takes from the earth: ‘In each birth, she whispers, a loss’. In this liminal sphere, the poet allows us to see both ways – to try and make our peace with the inevitability of darkness and cessation by adopting the listening, observing position of the poet, to find ‘that deep inhalation of the mind / [which] lingers a moment on silence, / observing the edges of things’.

On the tram, I open Michael Farrell’s new collection. Deliberating over writing this review, I am instructed by the poem ‘What the Land’:

 … The reading contract (not the writing contract) Is that you understand that you will feel Or think something. What the land forms in you In your mind. This relates to the history Of reading poetry, and to that of writing it

(84)

The book’s cover welcomes me – a waving male figure and a sunflower of equal height designed in washes of airy colour by Lea Muddle. Like surreal fireside songs with amusingly placed references to contemporary culture, the poems immediately engage. Then they provoke deep thought.

Once home, the volume fell open at ‘Pope Pinocchio’s Angels’:

In the bath, an

Angel can somersault without wetting the floor

(45)

Farrell's poetry embodies the creative part of nature – a communicative vitality that aligns with the bower bird building in tones of blue, the peacock spider dancing its colours, the cuttlefish strobing reflective waves over its own flesh. His works hum with delicious ambiguities and dreamlike puns, which entice readers to explore. I turned the pages in bed – chuckling at ‘ … dust mites with hands in their pockets’, and moved to tears by: ‘The enclosed imagination buys a hunting gun’. He writes of, ‘grass deep and delicately iced with petals’. There are many creatures, impalas, crows, sharks, a camel and even a professor from ‘Acadreamia’ who asks:

 … Is life even possible? Biologists virtually proved it wasn’t regularly, he assumed. ...

(3)

Childhood states of grace drift back to me as I reread the poem ‘What the Land’:

There are realities. There are things we stopped

believing

In when we were seven that haunt Us forty years later if we make It like guardian angels

(86)

I enjoyed my invisible angel friend, but gradually delight in the idea of flight leads toddlers to jump from low ledges and think of themselves as planes. The poet retains the powers of childlike imagination in ‘C.O.U.N.T.R.Y’

  … You see the plane

Appear to pause. You bring it across the sky with Your mind …

(9)

In a similar vein, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s filmic poem ‘Alakanak Break-Up’, (1989) insists we have the power to coax objects to move, to hear rocks, and on a molecular level to move as light over water (Hoover 1994: 518).

Distant skyscrapers begin to dim. Outside my window the pub and cafés are closing. The night sky is bright and miraculous. I retrace my way through the poem ‘C.O.U.N.T.R.Y’ - where a woman cooks noodles for her grandson.

 …  The

True way to do it, she said, was Under the blue light of the sky till You could see The Moon In them.

(9)

The poet creates mood with his curious food imagery. I remember ‘… blue as mould on pumpkin sandwiches’ (published in his 2012 collection, open sesame). Here in ‘Perverse in Form And Mood’ there’s ‘a lamington crawling out of a dinner bell like a white monkey’ (40), while previously in the book a ‘video burger’ and ‘digital prune juice’ are mentioned.

Two pages earlier in ‘Cate Blanchett And The Difficult Poem’, an actress is lingering on the taste of her own words. In contrast Farrell’s extraordinary surprises are delivered humbly in everyday tone. Here he sets up the scene, only to make a bracketed aside, which points to how we may overlook what’s more preciously alive.

… She speaks

laconically, fragmentedly to Waleed Aly who’s leaning back, watching the performance submerge the language. They’re locked in a dressing room or waiting longer than they’d expected to for direction, and Cate has picked up Southerly or

something

similar from somewhere. (If this was nonfiction they’d be playing with their phones.) ...

(6)

The poem, ‘I Love Poetry’ infers that amongst all creatures we are the oddity. We anxiously check our devices whereas roosters and motorbikes

… gather entranced for Hours

listening to Rhythms and rhythmic ideas, and other Matter, not quite either starry-eyed and eared, They go back to their Tasks seeing Moons in Walls and Lyrebirds in Skips

(25)

It's late. My local birds are asleep in the palm. I hover but am swept on by INXS, moons and art:

… Blue Poles defeats everyone

in the bar at darts. The moon threatens a window. Blue Poles sings ‘The Rose’ INXS gets stuck in the Mens …

(29)

Moons appear often in this book. In ‘Kangaroo Moon’, readers are asked:

What kind of light disintegrates the twentieth century? Every silver paddock that failed to feature a major image, every whizzed-by minor clearing of streetlights and moonlessness. Everyone knew what the moon looked like: a mauvey melon marked with wombat damage from brushing against the sun in rough eclipse. It’s here, it’s here, it’s here It’s not going anywhere. Hang with it, as if it’s the

beginning of your life

Who addresses who, who talks to light or kangaroos?

(35)

Most people ponder night skies. My father’s poems queried flying to war after only three days of honeymoon. By the time I was born he was stationed in Darwin scanning with ack-ack guns to defend against invading planes.

The questions continue from ‘Kangaroo Moon’:

You wonder why there’s always a man on a boat, a rainbow a woman taking notes The country splits in two I feel like a fencepost. I feel like a sketch artist for a box of sweets. They say to me, you’re our only Jewish

friend

I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m here, pretending to

live

in a tent. Is it history, this spiderweb hung with dew? The field as empty as its viewer. ...

(35–36)

These last seven words move us beyond our civilisation’s blind spots. We are beside ourselves now, aware but in denial. On the brink of extinction, humanity refuses to value the poetic, or to regulate greed that unbalances nature. The poem persists:

... Write out a docket for it then

of every kind of kangaroo, or fruit tree or friend, curling

like negatives …

… No one’s looking, no one is looking or writing. If there’s a voice in the trees it can

only be

the trees’ voice. But a voice by what light? The light of

poetry

making everything, splintering it, luckily, like a gold kangaroo that changes colour, not only its own colour, but

that of

their whole lit-up mob?

(36)

Yes, poetry illuminates. Its methods can be stunning like barehanded mountaineers ascending from under overhanging granite. This poem has reached its climax from a series of line breaks that fall as effortlessly as Pina Bausch dancers who enact life’s absurdity and pain. The dancers and lines collapse like empty skins to the floor, or into frantically extended arms. In the dance Vollmond (Full Moon), liquid is sprouted from mouths. Men are timed undoing bra-clasps, rainwater rises until dancers swim across the stage. Unexpected moves within a dance or a poem pin you to the wall of each place or embrace you while they simultaneously teeter you forward. This push pull fluidity in the dancing and in Farrell’s poetry fits with the seethe of the planet.

Opposite ‘Kangaroo Moon’ tiny key-pad dashes and dots resonate profoundly for me. In Australia’s harsh light they suggest grass clumps blooming up through clay (37). This soft/hard texture on the page reminds me of musical compositions of the seventies where sound colour was sought rather than pitch. Paradoxically, some that is played on fencing wires conveys an atmosphere of vast open space.

I eventually succumb to sleep. At 4am a delivery truck wakes me. I drowsily reopen I Love Poetry to ‘When Arse Is Class, Or Australianything’:

… Love of the shonky, and the daggy, dares to declaim its name in diction and in line, from here to Quatrain a once notorious Sydney suburb. Surf’s up as barmaids say in the hotels along the coast … … I’ve never been to Darwin, so my eyes don’t know where or how beautiful it is. But look out broken windows at the light and there’s the air that breathes us all, …

(87–88)

The circuitous routes and acute imagery of this poem of over a hundred lines trigger ideas of how the colloquial is part of evolution. Charles Darwin’s work on the gradation and diversity of finches’ beaks shows how everything adjusts for survival. Generational restructuring of the beak to eat local food gradually changes the music. We’re not proud to have invaded this country but we can own the tones of our speech.

While dressing for the day, I note:

… A philosopher’s

moon can be seen poking out of each pocket  …

Like a speck in a drone-shot, I cross an area reclaimed by the draining of swampland. Approaching Albert Park Lake, the voice of ‘The Philosophers’ poem continues. Though its timbre is casual rather than earnest it delivers a pertinent comment:

 … Platypuses lived here when

the suburb was first built, but they didn’t stick it out. In the morning you could see them swimming through the moon’s reflection …

(77)

Eels from the Botanical gardens swim underground tunnels to reach this lake, but time-poor St Kilda Rd CEOs who once jogged with the ducks now stick to rubber tread at the gym. I join waterbirds to read in the shade of old gums. The poems flutter their pages happily here. Aware this district was once a food bowl for ancient communities, I am struck by the implications of ‘Some Problems With the Page as Terra Nullius’:

That boat – from England – has sailed

(61)

We live in a bleach wash of brutal history. Only now, massacres our great grandfathers allowed are being disclosed. Farrell’s poems won’t go away.

Back home, I reach for the familiar green cover of his earlier scholarly work - Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796 – 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). He describes the writing hand as, ‘comparable to the hand steering the bullock or horse (later tractor) pulling the plough’ (40). He reminds that the word ‘verse’, meaning ‘turn’, is derived from the turn of the plough, and that from the beginning of writing in the West, poetry has had a relationship with rural life. What might be called life writing is examined, including songs and signs of Australia’s First Peoples. He also finds beauty and intrigue in collages, letters and messages carved onto trees by the newly arrived. There is his usual focus on punctuation and ironic humour, while an understanding of terrain comes through in all he writes.

I keep returning to an image from the poem ‘A Lyrebird’: 'Cars learn ethics through becoming nests' (1). An artwork that epitomises the power of nature for me is Bill Viola’s video The Deluge. Farrell’s poetic image of a slow disintegration to become one with nature is equally memorable. After reading I Love Poetry, I dream of red desert. In ‘A Lyrebird’, ‘a fallen down fence is a joy forever’ (1). The fences of my dreams sink and rust their own barbs.

Last October at Melbourne University, American Professor James Elkins, lecturing on the ‘Limits of the Criticism of Writing in the Humanities’, admitted that after 20 books he’ll now allow himself to write what he wants. Both he and his middle-aged host revealed they had felt too hemmed in by academia’s demands to write creatively. I’m so relieved Michael Farrell isn’t. He sees deeply and tenderly – with wisdom that goes far beyond STEM and our inadequate GDP (which omits to value care or even parenting). While Australia’s neglect of art and humanity escalates, Farrell contributes humour, and reminds us that art dives for truth and comes up with hope and invention. Farrell’s poetics move nerve endings to tingle and prompt us to deal creatively with life and our survival as a species on this planet.

The Body of Memory

Let us begin where Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? begins. After a quote, the opening line reads: ‘Harry’s first skeleton was the one he was born with’ (1). What a killer way to start. It made me want to turn the pages. This first essay is an absolute ripper – bold, compelling, considered, compassionate, thrilling. It also has wonderful style at the sentence level, reading easily, and offering an entry point into the book as a whole. I will leave it to readers to find out what happens to Harry and his skeletons but, needless to say, it is rewarding.

This essay also invites us in to consider the recurrent themes of the book – body, memory, community, relationships, longing. These come through even as there are a number of topics covered from chiropractors to yogis, moustaches to breathing. The body is more commonly a source of question than one of pleasure, perhaps best summed up as being the source of asking: what is it? This is not the body of carnal desire, though there is mention of that; it is the body as an object of inquiry and a vehicle of experience – it is studied, lived in, experienced. We glimpse hair, we stop to see the rise and fall of lungs, we stretch, we touch others with healing powers, we walk through real places and imagined worlds.

Just as it narrates a view of the body, Young’s book is one where there is often a permeable barrier between reality and imagination, which is seen by Paul McCartney’s appearance as if in a vision (12) and shrine to various quotidian things (41). This mixing encourages the reader to apprehend the mundane with a sense of the profound, the spirit with the material, the uncommon with daily life itself, all of which is compounded by shifts in perspective and tone (see the ‘our’ and ‘we’ in ‘Witches’ and the second person ‘you’ in ‘Can You Tolerate This?’). Never sitting still is one of the stylistic strengths of Can You Tolerate This? and reinforces how capable Young is of keeping the work entertaining even as there is a thread of quality and assurance throughout. It is at once general and particular.

Although firmly situated in the present, Can You Tolerate This? also combines the individual with the historical, including reference to figures from the past like Ferdinand Cheval (28), and also in a type of memoir conscious of broader forces (‘Big Red’). This is not only the body in space (New Zealand and other locales), as well as in time, with references to commodities, social relations, and the occasional year and date as well. It is a portrait, a kaleidoscope and a mosaic, too.

Nevertheless, Young does present herself as being a contemporary writer in a literary community (117) and knows that people notice her ‘sometimes scribbling something in my notebook’ (223). This is the corporeality of a writer who lives in the world and notices music, film, television, and social relations in them, of them and with them. She is at once adept and focused, reading into our age a fractured idea of belonging that has organs, teeth, and dancing.

Can You Tolerate This? is a reflective, introspective collection voiced in a compelling and readable style conscious of its self and its place in the world. It seems fitting that it is part of Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes series and nowhere is this clearer than when Young states candidly, ‘I found it easier to look at the edges of things’ (130). In light of the Northern gaze, it might be worthwhile to consider this more deeply, to think about what edges there are in the marrow of belonging to a community, tradition, one’s self, like Young herself does.

Brink opens with an imperative or invocation to self and reader, ‘Tremble’, a poem that summons what only a few years ago might have been an unfashionable presence, suggesting a poetic stance of contemplation or attentiveness, but within a kind of negation of its own material presentation: ‘This isn’t a book / This isn’t a map’. This ‘not being’ calls forth a kind of grounding that will recur in the collection, in reference to ground, grounds, bodies and sex. Here in a poem that evokes the notion of being grounded / or ‘centred’, ‘Tremble’ is centred on the page and calls:

Don’t look up in haste

Hold yourself’s self

To selves     to grounds …

(11)

The present to which the poet beckons the reader ‘present your lips’ is ‘cracked’. Presence is not the problematic presence of metaphysics but the fissured presence in which not only self / selves but also ground / grounds are multiple, weedy places, of situatedness, perhaps sites of ecological reason, such as Val Plumwood (2002) espouses, but also after-things (remains / leavings), and moreover evidence against us (‘The House is Full’, 30; ‘Weed Grounds’, 34). In ‘Data, Twigs, Memory Lapses’, the poet invites a meditation on this complicated presence through ‘divination of the present,  … the psychopathology of everyday life’ where ‘sky is always opaque as reality’, but ‘bears clues and trajectories’ that become paths on and of skin (21–22).

Situated in skin, language and sex are inter-implicated and in excess one of the other:

I come in with language I come out of … And my hand that allows me to come in with language then without.

(‘In My Shifts’, 12)

The interest with language continues in ‘The Lagoon’ but in the direction of complex emergences: of selves, gods, cultures: from ancient religion to individual identity – ‘The names of gods are in the clouds / and on each numberplate’ – bringing us to the detritus that might end up in a body of water:

Lists extend from scraps and packages waterlogged with the moon. The car tyre is without companions. … Here’s a track and some old crime tape.

(‘The Lagoon’, 13)

In this ‘lake’, the poet says, ‘My consonants drown.’ Are only vowels left? David Abram (1997) writes of vowels as the spoken breath. As it closes, the poem juxtaposes birds of prey (possibly attracted by the detritus), with air (breath):

… the harriers drift. Wings in relation to air. Air by the wayside, in the trees. Watery watery air.

(‘The Lagoon’, 13)

The dissolution and survival of self / selves in situations of personal, cultural, ecological undoing, and their relation to language, surface again in the next poems, ‘Self and Nothingness’, ‘They Are About Love’, ‘To Utter’, as the poets writes:

… I’m looking for ways to write back the damage

(15)

Wing lines argue with extinction as survival changes tack.

(16)

Stories you try to sing in an age of spit

(17)

The repetition of images such as ‘wings’ and ‘grounds’, the music and tone of the writing, hold hope in these complex social, ecological sites and experiences of injury where ‘Loss / spreads like highway, wings, disease, excuses’, and where

One day I shall already be gone. But the tree still breaths, kerchak kerchak—bats feeding their god in the guttural dark.

(‘Fruit’, 18)

Hope has foundation in the shared vulnerability of a more-than-human kinship – ‘The leaves are my sisters. / We fall.’ (‘Big Apple Leaf Summer’, 19) – where the human being is ‘another animal listening into the air’ (‘Scrawl’, 23). Ecological damage and mortality resurface in ‘The Shifts’ when the poet ponders the (im)possibility of adequate response ‘as ground smells of poison or bright hurt’ and asks ‘Will I die well as air falls in my crust?’ and answers ‘Nothing dies well’. This is not where the poem closes; rather the poet says:

Don’t delete everything, call me. Sing me a tender scale. I need to come home.

(‘The Shifts’, 32).

Language, death, a materiality simultaneously ongoing and abandoned, decay and persistence continue the complex thematics of embodied weedy and uncanny grounds (‘Edge Against Sign’, 33;  ‘Weed Grounds’, 34).

In ‘Speak Which’, the collection inserts a change of pace with a turn to a series of haiku / senryu-like stanzas, and earlier themes recur:

the shifting ground of the body

(28).

‘Afternoon Grey In’ offers a playfully unsettling change of tone (29). Then ‘Atmosphere (36) with its ‘species of weather’ and ‘While It Seems’ (37) with its ‘spider season’ give a broken form to the interplay and disjunctions of climate, gravity, loam and humankind.

Part I closes with ‘Phrases and Birds’ opening spaces for the unexplainable incursion of something that might be called grace:

… why some days the welcome swallow arrives with rusty breast and that story of movement where nothing      or no-one is a stranger.

(38)

The epigraph to Part II signals a continuation of the theme of ground, as ‘torn’ and ‘dearest’. ‘Accounting’ indicates a desire for life and deliberate, generous living, ‘without all the modest accounting’ where ‘ground / is dangerous’ (41). The vastness of want takes on an apocalyptic tone where love has disappeared or been unsettled, elided between things in what might be a post-disaster world (‘Our Epic Want’). Or is it that the gaze has become fixed on disaster?

We’d dreamt of last things first, getting behind ourselves, like an urge, or a fault. But there was plenty more, and we still had the air around our skin.

(‘Our Epic Want’, 43).

‘Blue’ begins ‘We are thinking the unthinkable today’, prompting the reader to consider what is ‘unthinkable’ – disaster, the Anthropocene, the end of Earth, our individual mortality, or that language is not absolute? –

We’ve found success in an obstacle but what if nobody knew there is nothing outside language except this deep blue sky.

(‘Blue’, 45)

Many of the poems in Brink suggest a deconstruction beyond deconstruction, which is more than ‘as if'. Albeit mediated by the senses, soil, air and water exceed human interpretation. These materialities and their qualities (such as colour) propose a kind of hope in the midst of devastation, even when calamity is human-induced. Culture and artefact cross with so-called ‘nature’, and we read of ‘the machine of normal air’, an image in which the poet could be thought to revisit a mechanistic view of nature, except for context and irony:

… Well might you plead for transcendence, it looks like a butterfly tattoo …

(‘Free Hand: A Kind of Thinking’, 50).

‘Wind Shadow’ is one of Brink’s more obviously ecopoetic pieces, describing a sensate engagement between body and more-than-human worlds, always where thought, reflection, consciousness, language and writing impinge upon each other and may themselves be more-than-human capabilities. These are not especially ‘climate change’ poems, but the spectre of climate change is the hovering context of the poems, and every now and then becomes explicit – ‘that trouble / with oxygen and carbon’. With climate change, the poet senses the escape of something that might be called sacred; this something is linked to the disappearance of creatures, through extinction or habitat relocation (‘Like Grains’, 53). ‘Bad news’ is like a host (‘If It Wasn’t For the Rumours’, 54) and the poet its guest. At the end of Section II, the poet asks ‘Is the solar system being hacked?’ and then shifts the gaze, so that

Now the magpie spies me and I become another timorous animal in the audacious, taunting air.

(60)

Part III brings a more experimental edge not only with form and playfulness, as well unconventional grammar and punctuation, but with formulae. In the sequence from which the collection takes its title, the poems are written in Oulipo mode without the vowels that appear in their titles (‘track plenty brink you much: AbsEnt, wIthOUt’, 78–82). The unsettling experience of contemporary contexts of rupture echoes in the style of unpicked language the poems perform. At the same time, a delight in the play of language restitches the fabric of a rent present. In an apocalyptic counter-apocalypse, titled ‘Everything is Beautiful, Finally’, where ‘Everything’s burned’, ‘The weather is our fiction’, the poet writes:

It’s getting worse      because it’s getting worse      becomes our lie Here’s to the seething future      It’s no longer obtuse or ambient In the silent howl        material spell breaks Or it’s just fucking loud

(90)

But despite the complex destructiveness that makes speaking ruptures such as climate change difficult, the poem ends ‘The last monster     The beautiful drowning’. That the beautiful is being extinguished or will be drowned in some Anthropocene apocalypse is only one aspect, the other echoes the title of Jones’ earlier The Beautiful Anxiety. In the rupture, the poet sees tragically a kind of beauty. But this is not so as to affirm the rupture or even the poet’s testimony. The poet is self-critical, writing

The speed on the lake is expected to exceed my vision. I’m here for the wrong reasons.

(‘Arkaroola’, 85)

There is a postcolonial sensibility, too, concerning colonial theft – ‘Who stole the river …’ (‘Arkaroola’, 85) and earlier a quiet recognition of the problematics of ‘whiteness’ when in ‘Washing Cycles’, the poet writes:

… as if we slip off our garments and pretend they disappear into a discursive region of whiteness, a place of no shadow or despair, no link to the ground …

(55)

The final poem of Brink, ‘After Memoriams’ takes us back to the opening poem’s question concerning the book:

This book of night stings over wrack into my mind can set new travelling thus hard true.

(94)

Brink is a strong collection that for me was a slow read, not because the poems are what some consider ‘difficult’, or on occasion experimental, but because on almost every page there was an image or idea the called me to recollection. Jill Jones’ Brink is a book to spend time with, to contemplate and in it to encounter a mature writing where the multiplicity of selves, grounds, and contemporary ruptures are faced courageously and with an affirmation that poetic language, not so much in what it says but in its saying, can perform hope.

At first glance, it seems all too easy to make overconfident generalisations about the flow and pattern of poetry in Mark Robert’s concrete flamingos, but it takes an unexpectedly longer time for a reader to move from one poem to the next, perhaps the way the poet intended. Robert's Poems in concrete flamingos are thought provoking of a different kind, for, they pull in the reader mind-and-all like a whirl, instead of giving an option to the reader either to carefully swim by or to delve into the whirl all by herself. Authoritative poetry with no frills is the need of the hour in this fast-paces world, where readers have little time to sit back and enjoy art for art’s sake, a fact that is clear in concrete flamingos.

Whether a Shelley, a Keats, a Wordsworth and their like would ever approve of new-age poetry, pattern poems, erasures and equivalents remains an unanswered question, but like art, poetry has evolved to be a free expression in form, in thought, and in poetic elements.

In an article written in 1894, to serve as preface to a Russian edition of a selection of Guy de Maupassant’s stories, Leo Tolstóy writes:

Maupassant evidently submitted to the theory which ruled not only in his circle in Paris, but which now rules everywhere among artists: that for a work of art it is not only necessary to have any clear conception of what is right and wrong, but that on the contrary an artist should completely ignore all moral questions, there being even a certain artistic merit in so doing. According to this theory the artist may or should depict what is true to life, what really is, what is beautiful and therefore pleases him, or even what may be useful as material for ‘science’; but that to care about what is moral or immoral, right or wrong, is not an artist’s business. (33–34)

The poet as an artist means business and poets at any rate have to connect to the reader either by collecting the reader's thoughts or by scattering them in all possible directions! There lies the success of any art. Like an abstract painting, the beholder might make a mountain of a molehill, that was never considered  by the artist; there is also the unpleasant vice versa, where the unparalleled, unique thoughts of the artist may never pass on to the beholder. Aware of such dangers, and taking visualisations as a credit, poet Mark Roberts begins his poetic migration from ‘concrete flamingos 1’: 'Deep like a poet' (9). These words are shrunk, blurred and arranged in 8 columns perhaps repeating 296 times. The humour lies not in counting, but in the umpteen times a thought gets stuck in one’s head, very similar to writers block, like the lines of a song running in spite of aversion as a background music, like the repeated aspirations and yearnings of an individual. Like crowded flamingos, this may look like dried up trees for some, rows of concrete houses for others, tessellations tricking one’s senses.

The poet explains common human responses to surrounding nature in the poem, ‘river currents’ (10). Longer pauses inevitably bring up yawn, a mark of getting bored, in any human who is less appreciative of nature. Alternatively lightning up the beautiful nature, the poet juxtaposes richness of nature against poorness in human appreciation by saying:

the mist hugs the river in early morning light you watch from weathered rock at waters edge yawn at a filtered dawn as memories emerge from the fog … but there is still the unease of sitting under a precipice knowing that the rock you are sitting on has fallen from the cliff face a bird answers another yawn

(10)

The idea that no one ever gauges where their thoughts might end up is nicely put by the expression:

… you stand and move inside still thinking of the deep river current and where it might lead

(10)

In the poem, ‘poem(mist’, the poet says:

it’s difficult to find the poem in fog like this

so thick

thoughts are shadows a hint of meaning you don’t dare follow

(12)

With no pretence, the poet explains the difficulty in making one’s creativity work for benefit, not only in this poem but also in other poems about writing poetry in ‘concrete flamingos’. This definitely brings some kind of comfort for any struggling writer by realising that similar situations arise in others' lives too and for a reader, it brings in some refreshing humour of kinder intensity.

Poems with titles in intentional brackets (14) are on similar plane. The poem, ‘(written)’ says:

you tell me/i am not a poet/ you tell me/i am not a poet

keeps running through out, but somewhere in the middle it says:

tell me/one word/i am not a poet

(14)

So, one can either take up ‘you tell me’ as one word or ‘i am not a poet’ as one word, thus expressing that it is not statement made once in some context, but is repeatedly hit like a volley leading to desperation in relation to the poet’s aspirations, very similar to a nagging feeling one finds when faced by repeated failures.

Likewise, in the poem, ‘(under)’,  the poet expresses his habit of voracious reading, so nicely:

yellowing pages dancing/ i could tell you that when I close

my eyes/ i can see my books/ i can read my books/i could tell you

(14)

In yet another poem, ‘(duress)’, the poet mocks:

my computer has been disabled/my typewriter has had its typebars removed/ no pens work/ paper crumbles to dust in my hand/ i walk in my small yard/ eyes closed/ reading the poems/ i did not write

(14)

The poem, ‘poem in orange’, though is about the way the poet expresses his working style, is quick and sharp in truth:

i take the words & layer them thick on the edge of the page then slowly spread them from right to left till the letters that don’t fit drop off the page & land on the floor

for greater depth

& complexity i take an image thin & translucent & spread it across the top of the page then sweep it down stretching it till in snaps leaving only a shadow across words

(16)

The poem, ‘the only marigold in erskineville’, is way too deeply laced with actual depictions of Erskineville, a southwest suburb of Sydney, infamous for Swanson street mews, shady characters, peddling and drugs, and home to a wide variety of ethnicity. The poet says:

i walk through a black & white suburb thinking of a poem i could write about how longing & desire creep up on you like a shadow on a cloudy day. … how to read a weed? from left to right? or is it a question of colour?

(18)

Making use of colours, grey and pink, the poet beautifully portrays the gentrification of Erskineville that happened in 1969, shifting neighbourhoods, trying to cleanse the composition by saying:

… like it was 1969 & they had taken some new drug. it didn’t take the police long to track down the vandals. Following a trail of pink paint splashes to a house around the corner. a week later the government painted over the pink with a slightly darker shade of grey.

(18)

Besides carefully choosing words, the symbolic marigold, that stands for despair, grief, cruelty and coldness due to jealousy, remembering and celebrating the dead, trying to cheer up good relations, all of these, is used here to best advantage:

i transfer your postcard to my coat pocket & notice again the explosion of the marigold outside the church.

(19)

The futility in learning of prehistory for common day to day living is expressed in the poem, ‘Prehistory’ (20); the aftermath of World War II is raked over in the poem, ‘onions’ (21-22), where the poet says:

temptation was not an apple but the crispness of a raw onion freshly dug tears of passion as layers were stripped away there is no god

(22)

The poet explores the ferocity of human actions as against nature and ecosystem in poems like, ‘ishmael’ (24), ‘after arrival – storm at sea’ (42), ‘byron bay’ (72):

… there remains the discussion of how to remove tons of dead whale without destroying the pool

(24)

… an old woman tells us of a storm at sea, of birds dropping exhausted into the waves.

(42)

… picture a whale carcass on a trolley & rows of workers' cars lined up in a sandy carpark

(72)

These poems critique a human society that thinks foremost of the inconvenience to itself as against the seriousness of ecological situation.

Changing landscapes and city life are expressed in the poems, ‘walking the landscape’ (41), ‘spring lamb’ (65), ‘crossing the mountains’ (66-71), ‘sea cave’ (75), ‘two photographs’ (76), and ‘fishing at swansea’ (77), stripping human society to necessary and essential truth.

Adding to the list of serious humour are the five poems under the title, ‘reading poetry’ (33–34), where the poet says that he spent a day and a night until closing in the university library stranded by the dewey decimal system reading numbers instead of poems, and lists his literary reading journey in dewey numbers instead of the titles of the browsed books, listing International Australian 20 C Poetry, Three centuries of American Poetry, Poetry of Jennifer Rankin, Complete poems of Emily Dickinson, Poetry of Michael Dransfield, Poetry of Henry Lawson, Australian Poetry, Poetry of Sebald, Poetry of Rosemary Dobson and The Newage Poetry.

Three variations of the opening poem of the collection, ‘concrete flamingo 1’ pop up at different intervals, tugging the reader playfully towards the poet's mind like some centrifugal force. The second variation is ‘concrete flamingo 2’ (31), where the words, 'Deep like a poet', arranged in columns are blurred, the third being ‘concrete flamingo 3’ (48), where the words, 'Deep like a poet', are twisted to form a whirlish wave like pattern.

Another interesting pattern poem is ‘concrete flamingo 4’ (54), which is not a variation of the previous three but stands out for its blurred words arranged like flamingo flight formations in the sky. In this poem, the poet subtly asks about thoughts that are bit tired, sinking low and slowly getting lost in exhaustion, just like the birds in long and tiring migratory journey, then gaining momentum and flying up, higher and safer.

The poetry collection closes with another profound poem, ‘city circle’(79) where the poet says:

you close your eyes & hear the rats in the ceiling. they have always been there waiting for the tunnel. after the last train they will take you there. they have their own poetry which you wouldn’t understand & they have already written your epitaph. you know that they will make their home in your bones.

Following the trail of the poet’s thoughts, the reader by this time nevertheless realises that the ‘rats in the ceiling’ are one’s own thoughts and they are there to stay till the end.

The poetry of Mark Roberts has a singular taste, a true taste with great richness, fullness, strength and variety, but the poet’s thoughts flies higher like his flamingos, making the subject matter less intelligible for a gullible reader. As a result the book, concrete flamingos circles in higher – learned – luxuriously intelligent classes rather than floating lower to satisfy the simplest pleasures of an appreciative class of universal poetry readers, for they fall into that class that thinks (which Voltaire famously explained to mean): All styles are good except that which is not understood, or which fails to produce its effect.

Here in concrete flamingos Mark Roberts has succeeded in running deeper than still waters, in thoughts, meaning and expression, without counterfeits.

Arresting the prospective reader by cover art that hints of probable shifting from green to grey, bisected unequally, past lesser than the bleak future, Passage, wonderfully wins over through worthy poetry. Serious literature of Kate Middleton as showcased through Passage evokes responsible reading rather than a leisure-time activity. If one finds it interesting in assessing the quantitative literature, it will be through Kate Middleton’s erasures, deftly handled, so much so that the poet’s erasures stand taller than the original text. Such an effect cannot be bought cheaply and easily. Lots of effort is spent on structure of poetry of Passage that leads to grateful appreciation by the reader. The simple notes provided at the end of the collection (110-16) are helpful for the understanding of dimensions of the poem as well as its framework.

Passage starts with the poem, ‘Lyric’, where the poet says:

… song stages history’s long speech

reads whaler’s voyage, lion’s maw

Opens field of ancient voice

Folds its origami:     Form

(1)

Collected under subtitle, ‘Past’ are 33 poems starting with ‘Untrod’ a cento after Tacita Dean (5). The poet says with such assertion as:

… ____ Modern white windmills produce prehistoric weather and the speeding up of time

(5)

The poem gives rise to concentric thoughts that leaves a trail of guessing to read the poet’s mind.

The poem, ‘Haw Count’ (7) is the first erasure poem after S.P.B Mais, This Unknown Island: ‘Haw count’ is gleaned from the first essay ‘Haworth’: 'Good Evening! Have you ever played that game of making up lists of the great men and women of the past whom you would most like to have seen? ...', where Mais tries to meet Emily Brontë in Northern Heights (3).

‘Haw Count’ thus begins:

Have you ever played a hillsman away from bleak,

brooding freedom?

I think we are absences, lost in the climb to meet reality, groundless.

(7)

The poet creatively adds:

… Hilltops stand under the beam of keen clear light.

(9)

and expresses the wildness as a muddy brown beck in a narrow ravine, calling out the strange crabbed writing as:

… where haunting has least rubbed off; is scarcely striking.

(9)

This, not only is suggestive of the hurdles faced in literary circles in the past, but also of the losing grip of such serious writing at present.

The poet’s mastery over material is demonstrated in the poem, ‘Lighthouse, Cape Otway’ (14).  Giving attention to every detail, thereby holding the imagery in a powerful grip, she says:

A sandstone cone stacked

on limestone cliff, here

the gash made by human

loss sealed

with scar of lighthouse:

until 1994

its Fresnel lens sliced

the waters uninterrupted

… with its three short white flashes

soaring over waves

every eighteen seconds.

(14)

Such surgical precision can be seen all through the poem where the poet explains the place, introduces the reader to the lighthouse keepers’ graveyard and its condition. Of the families of lightmen, who are often nondescript for a genteel world, the poet says:

the lightmen's families

lie miles from any other

place, and one stone reads

‘Sacred to the memory

of …’ The remembered name

now sunk beneath weed

(15)

As given in the notes (110), the poem, ‘On Bury Art’ is gleaned from the essay ‘Glastonbury: King Alfred and King Arthur’, from Mais, This Unknown Island.

To appreciate Kate Middleton’s erasure, it is delightful to read through the essay that begins with:

You know Camelot, of course. Everyone knows Camelot. The trouble is that everyone is so sure that his or her Camelot is the only right one.

… my Camelot is in Somerset. – where you may still see King Arthur’s Palace, and King Arthur’s Well, and look out over the forest-path known as King Arthur’s Hunting-track that leads straight across the island valley of Avalon, 'deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard-lawns and bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea', to the green knoll of Glastonbury Tor.

Mais says further that he would set out in quest of the Holy Grail and swore to find it perhaps at Glastonbury. He considers Glastonbury as a place of pious pilgrimage, for it was believed that St Joseph of Arimathea hid the Holy Chalice under the Tor and planted his staff on Weary All Hill. Concerning  his vow to visit Glastonbury, Mais describes his journey thereof, accounting every twist and turn through the hill, his encounter with withy-workers; when he reaches the Tor he flinches at a car-park on one side of the Abbey gates and a cinema on the other, and calls them as ‘unexpected intrusion of modern vulgarity’. But he also portrays the silver shining tranquility and serenity that the place instills in his heart (Mais, Unknown Island, 25-39).

Middleton deftly handles this in her erasure:

You know Camelot

Know that the only true Camelot is a green knoll of midsummer

But you needn’t thread every moment with a clock

of Arimathea

with the sacred cup under the Tor

buried between architecture and archaeology.

(16)

She cuts through finely:

… After landing be content with the remnants of a blue silk flag. (The monument is a severity          of pardon and vigilance, a

black piled heap of black

shawls, blotted out by grey

rain, oriented by the Dog

star.  A cinema.  A strange

obliquity of grandeur.)

And you unravel the tangled skein of rock.

More. Of grail.

(17)

The erasures and centos of Middleton’s Passage stand not only as poetic assertions but also shift lightheaded evaluations of structure poetry toward necessarily intellectual art worthy of examination, evaluation and gracious reception.

‘Study of a lion’ is a poem on Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The much acclaimed painting is a black chalk, heightened with white, yellow chalk in the background, sketched in 1612. The poet adds more colour to the painting by her portrayal:

…        Rubens has stopped his mouth with a single line …        Eyes steadily lighting toward the years one swift textured paw lifted ever so slightly Patient as an avalanche.

(19)

Turning over one’s thoughts about several poems, the reader arrives at a single poem ‘Day Trip on a Visit Home’ (53) under the title ‘Present’. The poet in quick succession draws out the challenges of modern day, deals with worldly pleasures and pains, and assures of a promising road ahead that rolls out if one is ready enough to watch out:

… to be astonished giving me permission to plan the next excursion. Slipping once again

into the car

we followed the curved road

(54)

The poem ends poignantly:

‘largest,’ contracted beneath the cloudless sky.

(55)

Remaining poems of the collection are under the title, ‘Future’ and begin with a cento after Sir John Mandeville, ‘Dispatches from Earth’:

Let’s load the ships with calamus

and not the oil of mercy

(59)

The reader cannot miss the intended words, ‘oil of mercy’. The poem ends with a different note:

Paradise is a loch —and it has no bottom

(60)

About ‘Passage’ the titular poem, the poet in her Notes (114) says:

This poem draws on a story reported on the BBC that, with the advent of ice-melt in the Arctic, the Northwest Passage has opened up in recent summers for the first time in a century, and bowhead whales have been passing through it. Research into bowhead whales indicated that their estimated lifespan is 150 years and that when dying bowheads are discovered, some still have nineteenth century whaling implements embedded in their bodies. The  italicized text is drawn from the letter left behind by the last members of the Franklin expedition before their death: their explanation of their fate was written in seven languages.

This note is essential for the reader to fully explore the feel of the poem, ‘Passage’ (87). Had it not been to this note, the reader would otherwise have failed to bring up the response of receptivity that the imagery commands. The poet wonderfully starts with a startling opening line:

Melt has brought about

reunion

Bowheads from both sides

—pacific, Atlantic— meet in

the middle

press together century-old grazes

(87)

Not a single word can be lost in the cascade and the poet has succeeded in lashing out at human actions:

… for them the passage never

found

…

highway

empty but for whales …

keep time

by the minute-hand of floe’s

advance and pass each other

in a season’s

song, allegro, warming into future tense.

(88-90)

In the poem, ‘Then Lie’ (108), an erasure of Mais’ ‘The Northern Highlands: Prince Charlie’s Country’, from This Unknown Island, the poet drags the reader towards disastrous reality:

The journey north is treeless

a world of grass and houses

(108)

and continues to unforgivingly serious imagery and word play, saying that the world is no more same as the often repeated ‘wonderful’, it has changed to impossible:

Repeat the word: ‘impossible’

as if forever

as if you see, north, the border

(108)

Passage ends with the poem, ‘Fable’ – a cento after Sri Hustvedt’s 'Living, Thinking, Looking'. A line that startles the reader, 'Dig and you shall find your own body alive' (109), not only jolts one’s thoughts but creates an unending wave pattern, leading from one thing to another and then the next. One can take the zoomed view of myriad meanings in the final expression:

You can’t pay your electric bill. You’re stuck. It is bitter to hear birds dull and interchangeable as postcards. A guillotine hangs over your perfect marble house.

(109)

It is alarming with its profoundness. Taking the bigger picture into account, the state of our system is not a science fiction anymore. It is deteriorating by seconds. As the poet says, there may come a day of dead end. The word ‘dull’ resonates to mean extinct, with many species, flora and fauna getting erased from the planet, unnoticed, and without farewells. They gracefully end up as postcards to help future human generations, such a pity. It is obvious that a guillotine surely hangs over our perfect house. A house, of humans and humans alone, a house to human actions alone, to become the biggest territory occupied by any living thing created by Nature, not so becoming.

Though these are representative examples of intense poetry of Kate Middleton’s ‘Passage’, not a poem in the collection can be taken lightly by the reader. The poet’s attention to detail has made the pattern poetry valuable from literary sense, and also the choice of poet’s texts speaks volumes on her intellectual consciousness, her depth of exploration and her belief in an ideology. This in a way brings out awareness in the reader, of the infinite probabilities a rich literature can create in a human life, renewing energy, increasing vitality.

Antigone Kefala, Fragments. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2016. ISBN : 978-1-925336-19-1

Tina Giannoukos

Antigone Kefala is a singular poet, one who has carved her own linguistic space. Her work is its own topos or place. Whether we read a poem from Kefala’s first collection, The Alien, in the 1970s, or a poem in her latest collection, Fragments, published in 2016, we are in a poetic reality that is like no other. Thus, Fragments enfolds into itself the poet’s life-long preoccupation with memory, loss and estrangement. Her disciplined rhythm and conceptualised imagery reveal her lyric at its compositional best.

A fiction writer as much as a poet, as well as a non-fiction writer, Fragments is her fifth collection of poetry, and her first in almost two decades. Born in Romania to Greek parents, she lived first in Greece and then New Zealand and Australia. After decades of writing in English, she has made the language her own, bending it to her own use, uncovering other cognitive potentialities in language than mere verisimilitude. She reveals how a consciousness as ethically concerned as hers might react to the unknown landscape before it and how it might carry the past into this new territory without violence but with humility.

As in much of her poetry, Fragments is trained on the dislocated but from unusual angles, the mood and shape of it, contouring experience itself. The subject confronts the truth of its provisional existence in a language that is as beautiful as it is unflinching. In the process, Kefala evokes the extraordinary. In the well-known poem 'The Alien' from her first collection, The Alien (1973), landscape and psyche merge:  'at night I see it rising from the hollow tower / dripping with mist / this land we search for in each other’s eyes'. It is less a question of whether Kefala’s poetry evokes an Australian landscape, though that is important in the particularities of her work, but the way elements of a natural or physical world, chiselled out of the landscape of language with the pickaxe of poetry, evoke affective states of being. In 'Letter II', memory is associative rather than direct, and the landscape evoked an Australian one by association but it could be anywhere. Kefala says:

The light today

clean as if made of bones

dried by a desert wind

fell in the distance of the roofs

and I remembered you.

(4)

The disturbing power of the poem lies in the way light recalls death, as if illumination is the secret knowledge of death made manifest, and memory the means of its manifestation.

In Fragments, Kefala’s restrained aesthetic, her spare lyricism and compositional acuity, intensifies the collection’s elegiac, if ascetic, tone. Kefala is uneasy at what returns to haunt the subject, but instead of lament or overpowering loss, she distils the essence of the experience, so the past and the present fuse in one extraordinary moment. Her ascetic response to loss yields a secular knowledge of time. In essence, Fragments pivots on the border between death and life, for what is remembered is re-enlivened. Having performed the Sisyphean labour of remembering, the spare beauty of her poems, as opposed to any verbose over-intellectualisation of mourning in dense lines of poetry, is the gift. But as much as many of the poems in Fragments are about what has passed, they are also about what is possible. In 'Dreams', Kefala says:

Dancing in empty rooms

with a young man

with white hair

dancing in rooms

that were growing

bigger and bigger

your touch

light on my skin

and the warmth

of your body

peaceful.

(5-6)

To remember the past in 'Dreams' is to summon the beauty of youth, an almost Greek worship of the kouros, those marble statues embodying the ideal of male beauty and youth. But the memory of youth and the reality of old age rather than being at odds yield instead a knowledge of what was and what is.

The collection consists of sixty-one poems across five parts. In the first part of the collection, which consists of thirteen poems, the past unsettles. In the section’s opening poem, 'The Voice', the eruption of the past into the present disturbs the already not-so calm tranquillity of the speaker:

At the sound

I turned

my veins full of ice

that travelled

at high speed

releasing fire.

This return

the past attacking

unexpectedly

in the familiar streets.

(3)

The past in the poem is an ever-threatening force that releases pent-up energy as much as much as it recalls the speaker to its power.

But the unsettling power of the past in Fragments comes from its power to nourish and wound; thus, in 'Photographs', the dichotomy of the past is that it is a force that intrudes, either positively or negatively, on the present. But this dichotomous power of the past to unsettle for good or bad is one that in our existential vulnerability we ourselves conjure:

The past

a drink, a coolness

we thirst for.

The past

a drink, a poison

we thirst for.

(7)

But if the past was merely an intrusive force for good or bad, the poem, and Kefala’s reflection on memory in Fragments, would remain a predictable dichotomy between now and then. Instead, Kefala refigures this dichotomy as something much more disturbing in its affective power to evoke loss:

Watching our selves

these unknowns

more adventurous

more luminous

new, glossy beings

unaware of the dangers

touching

in their innocence.

(7)

It is as if the speaker sees into the past and seeing is able to reimagine time as a regenerative force that yields a melancholy, if ironic, regard for the innocence of youth.

The poems in the second part of the collection are remarkable for their painterly exploration of the natural world. In all, there are eleven poems, distinguished by their empathy. Their mood can be ecstatic, even as darker elements surface. In 'Travelling', the stuffiness of the city heat in the first stanza, where the desert wind is 'blowing parched / through the windows', gives way to the ecstatic experience of the bush after driving through 'The suburbs dark with soot' (24). In the final stanza, Kefala says:

But the bush

full of silence

the wind at night

the sound of waves

high in the gum trees.

(24)

The poem’s attention to 'The suburbs dark with soot' or the two men on their verandah 'watching the traffic / in the apricot light / of the late afternoon' opposes the contemporary architecture of urban life with that of the natural splendour of the bush.

Whilst the poems in the second part of the collection are beautifully resonant, like the last stanza in 'Travelling', their affective power comes from Kefala’s articulation, in a mode suspended between celebration and sorrow, of an ecstatic response to the natural world. In 'The Bay', Kefala says:

Three divers

near the boat house

strange amphibious creatures

with black rubber skins

wrestling the waves

climbing the rocks

in the apocalyptic sunset

that left

gold orange strands

on the dark waters.

(26)

In poems like 'The Bay' Kefala oscillates between the beautiful, or within human understanding, and the sublime, or beyond human understanding. In 'Still Life', she says:

The light

caressing the water

with the hands

of a lover.

The trees

self-contained

balanced

at the exact point

known to them all

but not to us.

(30)

The poem, like others in this section, is awake to the enigmatic, as the experience of the sublime in a world where not all is readily available to the senses or the understanding.

It is in the four poems of the collection’s third part that Kefala most intimately articulates the passage of time. The poem, 'On Loss', represents her most direct treatment of anger at what death takes from the living, when Kefala declares in short, strong lines that 'Death needs no one / comes wrapped / in self-sufficiency' (41). The confronting 'Do you hear? / You all who strive for self / sufficiency / this is the way' (41) is oracular in its evocation of the power of death. In relatively short lines in 'The Neighbour', Kefala asserts the existential reality of death:

And poor Bob

still at the Resting Home

that nice place

the walls white, the bed covers red

and he sitting there in his pyjamas

drinking tea

unaware of the maple coffin

and she lying dead

and all the lovely flowers.

(43)

The fourth part of the collection consisting of thirteen poems revisits themes of loss. One of the poems most evocative of the passage of time is 'Transformations', where the image in the mirror or in a photograph becomes the dissociative experience of an unsettling encounter with time:

Our faces

these unknowns that shape

themselves silently

watch us out of mirrors

photographs

an accumulation so subtle

so untraceable

(53)

The fifth part of the collection, which consists of twenty poems, is the most public. In 'Public Figure', the subject of the poem has become his past, 'a famous story / he no longer challenged' (65). In 'Old Friend', a friend’s trauma requires the relinquishing of one’s own right to an experience of the moment:

She was uneasy

an inner vertigo

that held her

we gave her our attention

we renounced whatever claim

we had on the moment

to offer it to her.

(76)

In conclusion, Fragments articulates Kefala’s singular voice. Her heightened attentiveness to memory and loss reanimates the past and reveals what lies concealed in the moment. Above all, her concentrated poetics refine experience into its quintessence, offering insight without attachment.

Petra White’s fourth poetry collection, Reading for a Quiet Morning, is a narrative-driven, subversive poetic experiment, told in three unequally weighted (but each significantly weighty) sections focusing on the making and unmaking of subjectivity, worlds, dwellings, and self-myth. Readers at first may find themselves asking whether the three individual sections form a coherent and complementary whole that justifies their position beside each other: at its most reductive, the first section is an epic biblical retelling that composes more than half of the collection’s pages, the second focuses on mythic, historical and human myth-making, and the third involves translations of the German lyric poet, Rilke. But it may be that, with its focus on incomplete knowledges, partial perspectives, and multiple, fragmented selves, any disparateness and disjunction in the form of the collection as a whole in its first reading is precisely the point. These gaps are also bridged by a thematic and imagistic repetition that binds the poems together. Each section focuses on myth-rewriting, the power and capacity for violence within the process, the need to question ideas of a cosmic singular truth and prophecy, what possibilities exist for autonomy and choice within seemingly set scripts, and a critique of the masculine epic.

This is at its most sustained through the first section: the character-driven epic poem ‘How the Temple Was Built’ reimagines the biblical book of Ezekiel to examine human and mythic limitation. Even the God imagined is fickle and limited in his (the Bible’s masculine God is evoked) scope, challenged and haunted by his creations which are beyond him. The poetic style employed mimics the more prose-like structure of the Book of Ezekiel in the density of the lines on the page, while still having clear, clean and reasoned line breaks. Its voice has verisimilitude with religious scripture and the ‘epic’, but the language used subverts and undermines the authority previously given to these texts. This is both a secular and feminist retelling of the Book. The original text focused on the fall of Jerusalem as a nation, God’s divine judgements against spiritual ‘corruption’ as proof of power, God’s sovereignty and ‘grace’, and the promise of spiritual restoration in returning to his principles. White revokes this necessity. In the original, the prophet Ezekiel has a wife who dies, and whom God forbids Ezekiel to mourn. This death foreshadows, and stands in for, the destruction of Ezekiel’s nation which he is also forbidden to mourn. The wife of the biblical text has no name, no agency, and not even her death is allowed to be about her. White rewrites this script to give these to the character, alongside challenging both God as an objective, sovereign power and the necessity of prophecy. The idea of the infinite fractures.

Ezekiel and God – their acceptance of war and a grandiose sense of importance – are critiqued through farce. Ezekiel is introduced with: 'Ezekiel eats dung that a man may know the infinite' (2), drowning 'himself in himself' (3) – a concept of self-involvement that extends to the male / female relationships explored in ‘Landscapes’, the second section of the collection. 'Mindfucked' (7), 'parceled up in vision' (6) elude the comprehension of his 'infant sight' (7), for a visionary Ezekiel ironically 'cannot see reality very well' (p. 8) and struggles to translate and mediate the words of damnation he hears from God, into human speech or writing. He is mocked for his undervaluation of the human world and his grandiose role (in starting a war), but is ultimately pitied for his lack of agency. The path of destruction God envisions as follows:

The best way is man against man, and a human voice to stand the truth and make it run.

(20)

This God is steeped in contradictions of his own, along with his world which is vividly rendered with images that juxtapose and turn in on themselves. In this, God is an arbitrary figure with little control and less understanding of his own creations:

A whole second he devoted himself to galaxies … It quickly went out of control. Everything started creating itself.

(9–10)

Yet these creations – mortal, beautiful, violent, and striking, as exemplified in long cascading descriptions of animals, cells composing beings, and townships – 'each and every stunned him with strange completion' (10). This stunning affect extends to the reader through White’s startling poetic descriptions. But this God views humans as evil and sets them up fickly for destruction through unrelentingly grotesque war. He has to turn to Esther to understand them.

Esther, given a name and desire for vengeance over her young and unmourned death, is arguably even more dynamic in presentation. Made an immortal, lonely, isolated, time-and-space travelling angel, she 'reeks of life' (22) and resists God’s attempts to dissolve her humanity into angelic 'neutral love' (22). She becomes God's equal, calling him out for his contradictory actions and dismissal of his creations. She drops the apple into Eve’s hand, choosing knowledge of reality and its extremes over placid ignorance. She is a striking creation who White renders with startling rage and love:

God has frozen her humanity exactly as it was when she lived: miffed at injustice, spoiled, nothing more than a wife. Yet she grows inside the ice of herself, grows out of self, man-woman, oppressor and oppressed, her seeing burns her up. And she becomes a star.

(39)

There is a sense of the inhuman incomprehensibility of the cosmic in Esther and God’s existences and all-encompassing experience of time, but both are simultaneously made all-too-human, God in his confusion and self-absorption (defined as the quality of the human by the text) and Esther by love and self-righteousness.

All-too-human, too, are the townspeople who view their town as 'total' (4), 'making up stories, accounting for their own existence' (4). The town is vividly imperfect, 'its superstitions rooted as fact, nourishing itself / with industries of fear and fate' (4), on the brink of impending destruction and displacement. Although constructed in quick sweeping lines, this is a terrifying, haunting vision. After the battle, 'the animals and birds come' (34), creatures living beyond and consuming those killed by human shortsightedness.

The next sequence, ‘Landscapes’ has an ironically human focus – the human as affected by and affecting place, and the determinism of roles and the myths we make – and works to bridge the preoccupations of the other sequences surrounding it. It involves seemingly still moments in nature with human actors acting within them: liminal moments on the brink of transition whether destructive or constructive (with each containing an element of the other) including death and marriage, which get contrasted against domestic scenes. This section examines unions, failed unions, and fragments composing wholes with a humanist focus and examination of time’s effect on the self: 'A self plummets in the enormity of selves' (‘Anatomy’, 46). But White also extends this beyond the self to examine human effects on the external environment, as explored in the section’s first poem, the ecopoetical ‘The Big Small Loss’:

The human stands in a forest, the forest stops growing, the birds stop singing, and the terrible pause lasts only a minute.

(43)

The section also turns back to myth, including allusions to Odysseus’s Penelope and the creatively invented female executioner of Anne Boleyn who becomes an extension of death, and with an alliterative strike ensures 'Death’s dying is done' (‘A Quiet Morning’, 44). Language here crackles with colour, violence and wordplay. Its highpoint is a three-poem centrepiece focusing on the Oedipus narrative examining the hybrid creature, the Sphinx, with her riddle of mankind’s transitions, Oedipus’s mother Jocasta who struggles over her accidental relationship with her son, which concludes with 'I make nothing happen and it happens' ('Jocasta',  52), and Oedipus himself who is rendered baby-like, blinded and out-of-time in his self-fulfilling and circular prophecy.

The book begins with a dedication: 'In memory of my mother' and White’s mother and her role in subject formation seems to gravitate over the text, the mother hinted at as the source of the mythic in White’s understanding. Even God in the first poem is likened to a mother figure, although White uses reversions to complicate the relation, to examine how creators create themselves in relation to their creations and hence the anthropomorphism of God. Humans:

 ... wanted his likeness, as a child is nothing without the imprint of its mother. But God had no likeness. He created himself in the likeness of humans. ...

(11)

Maternal and female figures dominate the text, moving beyond dualisms being both creative and destructive figures, compassionate and lethal, with power over life and death. There is the murderous Sphinx in the Oedipus triptych, about to die, who sees Oedipus’s fate and 'in a moment of motherly compassion / is tempted to withhold the riddle', and Oedipus’s mother-wife Jocasta who muses 'What sort of woman am I. / Not a mother, not a wife, / in between', perceived as perversely hybrid, but to whom the text is entirely sympathetic. The mother becomes an ambiguous figure, full of contradictions. This is most direct in the second longest, and most personal, poem of the collection, ‘Filial (1956–2015)’ which works as the centrepiece of the final section of the book. This poem examines 'a love that’s scarcely human' (62) between the poet, her sisters, and her dying mother who created them, raised them, loved them and occasionally failed them:

Still, the mother is something mythical, she who first fed us language, oh the eternal wellspring, that beginning. Afloat on a violent sea of love for six children, pieces of herself forever lost in each one. She tried to retrieve herself desperately.

(64)

This poem is nestled between White’s interpretation of three Rilke poems to complete the final (and shortest) section in the collection. This section could have been expanded, but is poignant in its brevity. White continues her project of translation and reinterpretation of ‘mythic’ works through a focus on the poet, who also returned to Greek myth and human-like conceptions of God. ‘The Prodigal Son’ deals with 'all of what God created and all what / created itself' and 'the limitations imposed from birth, / never grown out of' (66), rather grown into through understanding of human subjectivity’s limitations. ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ continues to explore White’s fascination with monuments (and ruins) of Greek myth, the unchallenged masculine gaze as a literal relic. ‘The Panther’ closes the collection, and White’s interpretation focuses on the limitation of lenses and knowledge of the world:

The sleek black bars have paced about his eye-zone so long his gaze is a throng of a thousand bars, behind them no world.

(68)

The panther’s 'ever tightening circles' behind the bars reveal its interactions within the world. While these interactions increasingly shrink in scope, they are progressively intense in action and precision. The positioning of subjectivity becomes 'a dance of ungraspable strength', fighting for its own quiet dignity in the face of indignity and cosmological confusion.

But sometimes the curtains of the eyes lift and an image Flies in and twists … finds its way into the heart and dies.

(68)

Ultimately, the collection concludes with pessimism for the hope of complete revelation; moments of possible understanding of oneself and the universe falter almost as soon as they are contemplated, always partial, filtered and contained within the subject’s perspective. Myths and religious script, alongside feminist and secular theory, are shown as one among many ways of interpreting the world, any promises of cosmic revelation always farcically, but no less tragically, limited. But there is resistance and strength within these attempts at sense-making that White subtly celebrates despite her critiques.

One of Cordite Books' 2017 crop, The Only White Landscape by Derek Motion is a worthy addition to the list of this relatively new press. Motion, who drafts his poems publicly at his blog, has published one previous collection. The Only White Landscape is a dreamlike work of false beginnings, hidden emotions, daily habits and stray thoughts. The sentences are clipped, thoughts interrupted, subjects changed with dizzying frequency. The appearance of randomness is unsettling and yet if you stay with the poems, stories and experiences emerge: breakups, holidays, conversations, functionary work, the experience of ageing. In the poems, the landscape of the title appears to be more emotional and philosophical rather than physical or environmental. A 'derek' appears intermittently but the skeleton of autobiography is present throughout, as in 'flat sunrise' (all the titles are lower-case):

this the midday cone of your water grin a translucent fizzle underneath, prepped & captured, neutrinos complicit in a perky array of circumstances. nice. was this the first year without resolve?

(10)

The poems are relatively unstructured, with little in the way of rhyme scheme or traditional rhythm. The stanzas range from one line to unbroken blocks of text. The variety of arrangements give the poems an unstudied effect. They feel quickly written, unposed. Fragments from a fragmented consciousness, narrated by a daydreamer on mild sedatives. Poems end with words like 'anyway', 'hello', 'need', and 'anywhere'.

Motion alludes constantly to unknowns, new areas of thought, unmapped territory. Motion's work is an expression of the searching postmodern consciousness, but not necessarily a disembodied one. Action and purpose abound, as in 'avoiding soup':

my private catalogue of gestures, entry noted: the way your eyes flickered closed, accompanied by an almost imperceptible brow furrowing & head shake, ...

(21)

In her introduction to the collection poet Astrid Lorange writes of two possible interpretations of the title. 'The title can be read in two ways, grammatically speaking: there is only one landscape that is white; there is a landscape and it is only white' (xi).  Yet, there is a third, more exclusive possibility. The book itself is named as the singular white landscape, the only one in existence. This is also an ambitious claim for an author to make. The only white landscape, a blizzard, the arctic, a sandy beach. White is the colour of the absence of colour, yet it is of course never neutral. It seems natural to look towards an ironic racialised reading of the title, yet if there are racial overtones to the title they aren't obvious. In his preface Motion himself calls the book 'an assembly point' (ix), for what or whom we are not told.

Grammatical ambiguity is a hallmark of Motion as it is for most language when we de-centre ourselves and start to think about it carefully. Anything can become nonsense if repeated too often, but all language can be looked at again and differently to reveal deeper, though perhaps not always more profound, meaning. In 'infinity-plus-one' Motion writes,

handcuffed imagine your own routines as if there's scope to move cicadas answer the torture ad i mean

(18)

There are several rich ways to read this and these sorts of stop-short phrases are Motion at his most engrossing. Where to end the thought? His line breaks are often suggestive in this way but thoughts spill over and many nouns could do double duty as subject and object. Why not try both?

Technology, and its effects on humanity, is a common thread in Motion's work. A certain weary skepticism we are all familiar with is present. Consumption and production of poetry, like so much else, has rapidly changed. This is a printed book drafted online in public view. As unusual as this composition method is for a poet, it's effects are not obvious. Like any technological change, human choice still plays the deciding role in how things are used, and humans don't change all that much. From 'narrandera'

... & almost unthinkingly i saved a facebook headshot & thought of tiny polaroids in wallets, chaotic creases pre-internet but the same truth value: is that your girl?

(12)

Relationships and their rhythms are sensitively and honestly explored. Motion's moods feel stonewashed and worn, familiarly dreamlike. The deceptive dirge 'much else so' ends in a beautiful moment of comfortable love:

the petrol light threatens, the radio stresses locality & you're so sensible a one-track thematic here: i thought the sensation might fade with time like much else so wrong

(16)

There are striking images ('infinity-plus-one'):

lamplight pinned to the setting day's pantone code just for me ...

(18)

There are moments of almost classical rhythmic beauty. From 'carry-on limit'

 so you collect all the best lines written & place them across the sky's fade: the best & truest of all things thereby magnified the intensity upped, all the feels laid bare

(29)

and beautiful images written in plainer style ('mouth words')

tailgating numbers into view for you all pollen & rounded vowels / a cotton field trembling to the buzz of clavier preludes

(39)

and humour ('finity plus one')

myopic cunts stream past the shopfront hip to the funding round ...

(40)

In 'simple explanatory love poem' Motion closes the poem and the collection with a settled note at the end of a long day's drive with a loved one:

& the scratches a prop insulated by the car this universe is at last bounded no references to interpret, no need

(43)

Taken in aggregate and read over a single day these poems induce a dreamy state in the reader. Half-narratives, daily moods, ordinary tasks, overheard speech are reviewed as if in a photographer's dark room. There is a certain jarring sense of 'you had to be there' about this work. The poems teach you how to read them and reward second and third looks. Motion's work lacks the baggy verbal self-reference of poets like Michael Farrell and others who write in similar styles. At times his work feels indistinct and unmemorable from poem to poem. Yet by the end of the book a strong personality has shone through. The Only White Landscape is an oddly comforting book. It says to the reader: that dizzying feeling of life between liquid modernity and sublimated postmodernity, 'the feeling of inhabiting an untenable version of the world' (Lorange, xi), you are not alone in feeling that, 'like much else so wrong' (16).

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

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

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

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

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

first call

koel                                                                                       koel

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

: your standing is a gate

: & yours              outlines a slipper

[...]

a sun-drop

koel

[...]

(1, 3, 4, 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a crossing

smashed scattering   bulwarks

blond splinters     circling

it was        ‘someone’s coming out for our furniture

(unhinged gate & circle     drive bursting

feet swollen    seats

face-up         nestmates

imploring

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

soak your ankles   look out

perimetres               fully ponding

look

(51)

long drawback

low surge

spread earth eats

years   goods           matchstick restarts

splinter   bed   circling

solder                                              water

(52)

long walk

long wavelength

(53)

nestmates             loosed

glyphs                curling                                   weight

over a desert’s                   honey sliding

carrying        that old life on

through foot print  cell   holes            live

and none

(the carried unseen

dipping their feet in under

(54)

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

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

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

(55-56)

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

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

I had the good fortune to first get to know Marietta over a couple of years in the early 2000s when we were both members of a poetry-workshopping group. It was a convivial, energetic and sometimes argumentative group with a number of strong women, older than myself – experienced poets not shy to speak their minds with humour, wit and alacrity. I was starting out as poet and I learnt so much from their energetic disagreements, their life and poetic wisdom, and their trenchant critique of my work.

These women carved out artistic careers for themselves in an era which didn’t make it easy for women, and I admired their tenacity and verve in imagining unconventional creative futures for themselves, often alongside other professions. Two of that group – Connie Barber and Christina MacCallum – have now died and still they live through their work and their words.

Marietta was one of that feisty group of women, and she and they first introduced me to the rich diversity of the Melbourne poetry scene. Through Marietta’s heritage and bilingual work I was also connected more immediately to the European poetic tradition – with all its beauty and suffering.

It was in this workshopping group that I first learn of Marietta’s background as a Holocaust survivor and the gruelling way in which she and her sister had survived those dark days. Her previous book, island of wakefulness, is dedicated to the de Kamp family – who risked their lives to save hers.

A perfect distortion is Marietta’s third book and second poetry collection. It is a book of creative collaboration and many different kinds of partnerships are celebrated between its covers. Marietta pairs her poems with Dutch translations by Joris Lenstra, who also translated her previous book. She also couples her poems with photographs she has taken, alongside the artworks of others.

Marietta writes in A perfect distortion of human and non human worlds. Many of the poems are set in two sites of poetic and photographic inspiration for her – Darebin Parklands and Yarra Bend Park. She also writes of illness and outsmarting pain, of art and art-making and behind both of these, of perception itself.

Many non-Dutch speakers will skip over the translations but it’s rewarding to actually read some of these poems, comparing them to the English originals. I had many thrills of word recognition, even though I don’t understand the language, possible because both have a common linguistic ancestor and there are words similar to the English, particularly once spoken aloud.

Marietta brings her photographer’s eye to poetry and her poetic eye to photography and they have been companion occupations for her for many years. Common to both are shadows – both metaphoric and literal and there are many in this book. This doesn’t make it a dark read but one with depth, and as counterpoint to life and light, or as Ian McBride says of Marietta’s previous book; a ‘deeply bewitching calm surface over dark water’.[1]

Part of this darkness, she tells us in her biographical notes, is that the cancer she described memorably in island of wakefulness has metastasised to her spine. She is a courageous writer, who uses the challenging prima materia of different types of survival: breast cancer, the Holocaust, and displacement, as poetic starting points. Through poetry, ‘she has been able to transform these experiences to make peace with them’.[2]

In emotional tenor, A perfect distortion is perhaps more resolved than island of wakefulness, as if the process of transforming dark material has proceeded apace and brought Marietta a greater measure of equanimity. In a poem that describes a bone scan’s inconclusive result, she describes that balance to which seekers of self-knowledge aspire:

a state of unknowing not a willful turning away the yes no hovering like the needle on a fine set of scales – forever seeking equilibrium

Or even more lyrically, she describes this sought-after condition as the ‘Breathless moment between summer and autumn’ (7).

Many of the poems in A perfect distortion describe the act of looking / perceiving and reference the plasticity of perception. ‘I wish I could see it / from two places at once’ (13), she says in 'Seasons, Darebin Parklands'. In a poem of appreciation for a gift of a painting by Danial Kagan ('Waterlily'), Marietta articulates the centrality of seeing to her. ‘[A]s long as you have eyes / to see’ (55) she seems to say, this can be used to transport you through even horrendous life experience. In another poem she talks of ‘Stripping away the comfort of interpretation’, relinquishing the control we sometimes think we need to generate the capacity for deep seeing (11).

These reflections on perception are also evident in Marietta’s photographs. Most of them, including the gorgeous cover image, are blurred – not to obscure the real I think, but rather to reveal this malleable dimension of it. She creates atmosphere, mood and flow with these images – whether this is of river, light or, taking the patterns one step further, emotion. They are impressionistic meditations that mirror and amplify her words. Many of the photos do what it is so difficult to do with words – describe the nascent and the metamorphic; life pared back to energetic essence.

One group of poems focuses on Marietta's illness, with some of the work portraying encounters with pain. In one poem, pain is pithily described as her ‘sour chaperone’ and referred to in the title of another, as 'Painbird' (43).

One of the most moving and accomplished poems in the collection is 'Knowledge'. This is a devastating poem to read, as it must have been to experience and write. Victims of racism, or any other hatred, often internalise the attitudes on which the discrimination was based, and the treatment meted out to them. In a cruel additional twist they need to rid themselves of this internalised negativity, a process that takes many years and perhaps is never complete. Marietta’s poem describes part of this process and underscores the ongoing horrendous legacy of suffering bequeathed through living through the Holocaust.

The loss of my hair    exposed the nose of the rabbi     face of an uncle     who failed to return skull’s smooth symmetry

Other family members including her Mother are also honoured in A perfect distortion. Marietta dedicates poems to and acknowledges many important others – the late Leo Shan, MPU confederate and workshop companion, friends, colleagues, muses and fellow artists.

Poems in A perfect distortion are not complex or abstracted far from the concrete – they have other strengths. Most are written in free-form, with one Pantoum – 'Their own perfection' – a poem redolent with poignant finitude. A handful of Haiku lend extra compression and trademark Elliott-Keleerkoper wit. Consider:

Autumn afternoon A gust of wind takes my Haiku

A perfect distortion is a clever title for this work and is emblematic of Marietta’s aesthetic. It acknowledges the serendipitous nature of artistic process alongside the fact that psychological balance is hard-won through the acceptance of paradox, the straddling of opposites. This is an anti-heroic stance where one needs to be willing to accept the light as well as the dark – the perfect as well as the distorted. This theme is referenced in other poems and implicit is the knowing that in a life as well as a poem or a photo, the shadows define the light, quintessentially.

Marietta’s voice rings out confidently and true in A perfect distortion, work milled from a lifetime of words. It is a book of wisdom, poems of simple eloquence.

There is a rising sense of unease in Felicity Castagna's new book, No More Boats. The story is played out between a disaffected son, Francis, who drops acid in clubs and gets into fights; a disengaged daughter, Clare, who has given up school teaching to work in a bookshop but who has not revealed this to her family and an increasingly distant wife, Rose, who is becoming estranged from her uncomprehending husband, the Italian immigrant Antonio. He had an accident on a building site, has lost the use of his left arm and has been forced to stop work. The world around him is shifting and becoming unrecognisable and he can no longer find his place in it. Alienated he finds a sense of purpose with a right-wing, ultra-nationalist group who inspire him to paint 'No More Boats' on his concrete front lawn.

It is August 2001 and the Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, has picked up 438 asylum seekers and crew from a shipwrecked Indonesian fishing vessel in the waters off Christmas Island. Prime Minister John Howard will not let the Tampa bring the people to Australia. It is the defining moment of his Prime Ministership and gives rise to the slogan that won the 2001 election, 'We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come'. It is the moment when Australia shifted from being an inclusive, egalitarian society, to one which accepted the demonisation of refugees and the bastardry of offshore detention. It is the moment when populist racism was allowed into mainstream political discourse and both major political parties adopted the fear of the foreigner as a vote-winning device.

The painting of the slogan, 'No More Boats', on the concrete front lawn, signals Antonio's social and emotional collapse. Castagna expertly describes an incremental process of Antonio's descent into confusion. He had been going out at night and throwing rocks at the houses he can no longer build, he had told his friends to 'fuck off' at his own retirement party after overhearing a remark about his inability to work; he is not able to communicate with his wife or his children. The novel shifts across multiple back stories in a complex tapestry that brings all the characters together at critical incidents. Somehow everyone has an immigrant history. Clare's colleague and lover, Paul, is Vietnamese. Her mother's best friend and neighbour, Lucy, is Polish. Francis's two best friends, Charbel and Jesus, also have immigrant parents. Francis works as a bricklayer and Castagna gives vivid descriptions of the kinds of building shortcuts utilised by profit hungry developers. The novel is embedded in multicultural Parramatta, and many of the major characters either lived or worked at Villawood Migrant Hostel in earlier times.

After the slogan painting incident, Antonio finds himself welcomed by an anti-immigrant group in inner Sydney. The headquarters have a bust of Ned Kelly, a Eureka flag, and the whole place 'had the look and feel of a cubby house for teenage boys'. The group take over Antonio's front lawn as a site for protest where the skinheads and the old people with a Pauline Hanson placard stand against the Socialists and the Pacific guy with the big arms. More profoundly, Rose, Clare and Francis find themselves in opposition to Antonio who is increasingly lost in memories of the world he came from and no longer able to imagine himself in the world he is in. Perhaps that sense of confused nostalgia and consequent inability to engage with the present is the abiding metaphor of the book. Castagna delivers a vivid world of people, place, histories and incident, that is also an origin story for the resurgent white Australian nationalism underpinning the modern tragedies taking place on Manus Island and Nauru.