Perhaps typical of the kind of psyche that envelops us in the retirement phase of life, Greg Tome’s poetry hinges around reflection. There’s reflection on aspects of nature immediately around, reflection on people present and long gone, reflection on human nature and, most poignantly, on mortality and the inexorable march of time.

Appropriately, Tome’s poetry collection, published by Ginninderra Press in 2017, is called Watching from the Shadows. His voice is emphatically that of the observer, the one who needs to make sense of what he sees and draw salient lessons. Though the shadows on his own life are lengthening, not everything is treated with a heavy touch; there is time still for something of a whimsical eye.

A former secondary school teacher living in southern NSW, Tome has written plays and two novels as well as poetry. He has a strong and capable grasp on form, his modus operandi a free-form style that he fashions to the mood of his piece. His no-fuss diction and measured image-making give his work a sense of immediacy and honesty and a kind of quiet passion as he searches to make meaning of all he observes and reflects upon.

'The Voice of Shadows' feels totemic of the mood of the entire collection. He writes:

A lopsided silence sits about me, perturbed by a creak of board A creak too slight for human agent. Nobody is there but caused by something unseen perhaps unreal.

(46)

It is Tome’s own history and that of his family and ancestors that he senses present, that lurk behind the facade of his world, and that need some kind of reckoning:

I view my rational thought now a cupboard, stark, clean of line. Practical, sensible. But its door is shut tight. Packed there behind it, behind all the rational, useful terms lurks nagging disturbance lurks dark and mystery.

(47)

From the shadows he can observe and bring light and freshness to aspects of everyday life, such as in 'Woman Pegging Clothes', 'To a Dead Mouse', 'School Excursion to the NGA' and 'Batting for Paradise', in which a cricket match becomes an occasion for reflection on life’s final 'dismissal':

For me the grim reaper wears an umpire’s coat but needs no referral system before he raises the fateful finger.

(27)

Out of the shadows come people and events from the past that require understanding, honouring and appraisal. In 'Anzac Heresy' he puts a blowtorch to Australia’s fascination with myths of war; in 'Memory of a Prisoner of War' he tells the story of an unexpected, kind act by an elderly German woman; in 'Frank and Mark: a tribute' he reflects on his uncles who died as POWs when the Japanese ship that was carrying them was sunk in the Pacific – 'The good die and the unjust thrive, just as the Book of Job says' (66) – and in 'Torrington' Tome takes sober stock of the far-flung country town set among rocky outcrops where he began his teaching career:

Despite its name no market town in Devon is this place. More a hideout where only the blousy old pub flaunts its up-yours presence … Where now is Gloria, little Linda, or landlord’s wife Or the hawk-eyed headmaster with the generous Heart? Time swallows us all bit by bit, until Only God’s careless granite rocks will remain

(68)

A sense of humanity and a compassionate concern for the world comes through in much of Tome’s work, and he is aware of the enormous damage we humans are causing the Earth. In 'Penny Lizard', he contemplates humanity’s short but violent history in relation to reptiles:

Perhaps I will outlive

this little one

I saw this morning

But long after we have disappeared

from the planet

having outsmarted ourselves

into extinction

these tiny reptilian creatures

will be here

to dart

and look

and breed

for many millennia to come.

(34)

Tome’s aim for an honest, immediate poetry is not well-served, it must be said, by his tendency towards prose and a plodding, clunky language short on vitality. His imagery is so measured it seems to rest casually on the page rather than leap to engage the reader; there is no pay off of risk or challenge, just a sense of comfortable security of thought and observation. Perhaps, aware of his own mortality, he is done with too much uncertainty, the province of younger folk. Yet the prospect of death is, of course, profoundly unsettling. In 'The Last Taxi Ride', he handles the subject with customary restraint and good grace:

Oh glum chauffeur, nobody is bustling to head the line at the rank where you collect your fare. But as my years spin by in a dizzy cycle of days and weeks I move closer to the front of that fatal queue …. Give me the Business Class passage and make it quick. But most of all, I beg you, I almost pray, let me leave with dignity, at least a few shreds of dignity. Dignity.

(90)

One hopes that his wish his heeded, and that until such moment his progress to the front of the line is slow enough to afford him much more poetry.

In his afterword to Land Mass, Robert Wood observes:

There is a vast body of poetry and poetics on land. From the pastoral to the idyll to the eulogy, it could be said to be one of the definitive and dominant themes of the art. There are poems about love; there are poems about death; but land, as that place-thing, has been a foremost concern for poets working with and in ‘Australia’.   (117)

I am one poet for whom this observation is certainly true, but my approach to place is very different from the one developed by Wood in Land Mass. I write a conventionally lyrical free-verse of particular places where I have lived, investigating narratives / memories tuned to the orientations of ecopoetics and postcolonialism. There is almost no narrative in Land Mass. And the emotional attachments conjured in a memory of a particular place are also minimised. Land Mass is a remarkable philosophical reflection on the semantics of place, it is a language-play that investigates (in the abstract) the plants, minerals and animals of place from a myriad of sources: poetic, anthropological, historical, popular and scientific. The impact of this is certainly demanding and complicated but also, because of its originality and concentration, highly rewarding and challenging.

Land Mass is written in three long sections: ‘OCHREPIT’, ‘CROWNLAND’, ‘BREADFIELD’. And while there is a brief afterword there are no other explanations or author’s notes to help a reader. This is perhaps surprising given the breadth of allusions and cultural research that has underpinned this text but Wood trusts his readers and quickly has them immersed in his project. Wood’s language is dense and he often employs the strategies of the list poet as he scatters his lines across the page, often hyphenating words in unusual ways, to advance his experiments in the abstraction of place. So ‘OCHREPIT’ begins:

Urhome, unhome

way thro

heart everyway, stop

heart, the everyway

name of turtle, name run-bird talks two-two, skin, young fish spear along glutinous, country fish swimming along fire run along, black goanna black no whip and owl, own it bonefish and bullroarer

cash-bomb of truth, bartered

spent against elkamore grub in tree-rub, hit

brush sand brush

dog find it

finger-nail, rock

wallabay, euro, tail

mallee country, big belly

sweet-stick spider-web brother to a large blue morning bird credit where debit’s dew

(3-4)

The colloquial rhythms of these opening lines echo a crowd of life forms gathered around a campfire in the darkness and in turns chanting their lines in some ritualistic performance. What is also clear from these lines is the sly and comic edge that Wood often employs in these word plays, for example that pun on ‘dew’, where he sums up ecology’s fecundity, that ‘big belly’. The flow of Wood’s thoughts is as subtle as the confluent movement of those swimming fish that morph into flying spears that morph into fire runs becoming black goannas before the final ironic ‘cash-bomb of truth’. This is a startling image of environmental warfare and of corporate and state sponsored greed.

Section Two of Land Mass, ‘CROWNLAND’, begins:

Om,

exalt

praise-claim,              mourn

confess that songlist barrier great

lode-recession, triple A

iron-gated

thousand-gated; stormed

tiger, lion, wolf, bear, worm, moth, gnat, mozzie heaven, earth, wind, air, water, fire, men, gods cattle, birds, herbs, trees, beasts, ants, moon grammar, ritual, math, astrology, logic, star, sky rice, barley, austerity, faith, truth, continence, law

dust-stemmed

clay flamed

a buttress of intake pitch tent

brake idols

boast round and bath down

soil sand and crow is

crawl-granite, infernal and devoid

gully-fly

ragged hat and piled

summer’s haggard call

trumping all

beer-squash

clarion-fiend and coolant green

verdant, verjuice

vincotto burnt

realism’s dusty track

a subcrocdilian vitality

dust bat; war call

(21-23)

There is so much irony in the title ‘CROWNLAND’: what protection has ever been secured for First Nations and Country under the pernicious and acquisitive English monarchy? And Wood also uses humour to good effect in these interrogations as he slyly positions such notions as astrology alongside math and logic. There is also a clever touch of the mock-heroic in the opening ‘om / exalt / praise-claim’ which is quickly deflated by lamentation for a roll call, the ‘songlist’, of human-induced wild extinctions (that ‘great / lode-recession’). And if the elements of the list poem might seem to suggest hidden meanings and deep psychological resonances, in the author’s reasons for inclusions / exclusions on these lists, this is an expectation that is cleverly undercut by the juxtaposition of apex hunters (tiger, lion, wolf bear) with those pesky gnats and mozzies, and by the jarring placement of ‘moon’ at the end of the line which is otherwise so terrestrial: ‘cattle, birds, herbs, trees, beasts, ants, moon’. Some of Wood’s imagery is also visually striking (especially that ‘crow is / crawl-granite’) and the knotty image of that ‘subcrocdilian vitality’ along a ‘burnt / realism’s dusty track’ is so unexpected. What does it mean? And how can the ‘vitality’ of an apex hunter in our waterways be secured along a burnt and dusty track? This is indeed a ‘war call’, and the mystery resonates in our consciousness long after we have closed Wood’s book.

In the afterword to Land Mass, Wood writes: ‘any land word-game needs to pay attention to the perspicacity of experience and the historical density of existing discourses’ (117). Wood’s complex and challenging book achieves this with sly irony and subtle humour. This is not a book for a lazy summer afternoon. Land Mass is not always easy to inhabit, leapfrogging as it does from idea, to concept, to sensation, to action, from tiger to mozzie, but Wood interrogates the irrationality of our incapacity to dwell with justice on this earth. This poem sequence is a jagged journey through place and through thoughts.

Lang/ue of the body/of the world

‘SkinNotes’ – say it aloud. Like poetry, and Kristen Lang’s poetry in particular, this is a title that springs into life when it’s read out loud. Do you read it slowly, enunciating each word, separated, as they are, by the capital N of ‘Notes’. Or do you run the words together with a slight trip on the second ‘n’? When I do this, the words begin to bounce and fall apart. I think of ‘denotes’ and reflect on symbolic language and what the poems might suggest about skin and the deeper notes below it. Then I notice the ‘kin’ nestling between that slippery ‘s’ and the firm ‘n’, and am startled once again by the subtly of Lang’s use of language; for these poems are indeed about kin – connections of blood and belonging – not just to a human family but also to animals, elemental forces, the earth. All this makes Kristen Lang’s SkinNotes a rich text, well worth an ecopoetical reading.

SkinNotes is divided into four sections, each taking a slightly different perspective on human connection or kinship, and spanning the breadth of how we experience it - from the intuitions of skin to front of brain ‘noting’ or reflection. The first section, ‘Blood harmonies’ begins where, perhaps, our conscious awareness of connection with others begins: in family relationships – between parents, grandparents, children; and extending to ‘[b]ecoming an aunt’ (22), siblings, husband and wife; and, notably, pets. The second poem, ‘Family album’ (7) draws all these, and more, elements of family together. Here readers may note the inclusion of the ‘Pet’, ‘Place’, and yet more: the ‘Dead’ and ‘Stranger’. The presence of such elements is testament to the breadth and depth of Lang’s thinking, that she is able to knit such diversity into a rich portrayal of what it is to be human, both as an individual and as one within a vast network of others, a community that is both human and nonhuman.

Section two, ‘The fragile mind’, goes straight to the heart of how this spider-web fine network of communion comes into being. It explores the fragile threads that bridge the spaces between mind and world, and the delicate mystery of life itself. Alongside poems like ‘The small house of her body’, which tells of the grave illness of a child (40-43), are, again, poems about the nonhuman world – ‘Vigil’ for a dog (57), and ‘Lake’, in which the waterbody becomes subject:

To passersby, you are the one emerging from the water – the lake dripping from your clothes, the woman not seeing, reaching into the air, as if she is yourself.

(45)

Lang, in this section, constantly dissolves the boundaries between human and nonhuman and emphasises physical and sensuous being as a means of communication between us and the world. The thinking mind comes well behind the feeling brain, and this is a physicality that Lang shows us we share with the nonhuman world –

She is the nest some cuckoo has taken, the chick already hatched, wet still and calling, calling under the house.

(40)

Section three of Lang’s volume, ‘Being here’, resonates with Hamlet’s eternal ‘to be’. It nudges these themes further, asking what is it to be human, or to be what we are? Lang subtly takes esoteric thought down a notch, and brings us back to earth, reminding us of the simple miracle of ordinary existence. In Lang’s hands, angels become, wonderfully, horses:

How the angels are not ourselves. We dress them. We change the angle of their wings, the whiteness of their frocks, but whether they move in us or refuse to move … It is possible they are here and we do not notice. There is a horse in the field beside our house.

(61)

Another poem in this section, ‘The stronger light’, has an especially lightning-like earthing power. It contrasts living and death startlingly:

You will say that the cadaver … is a clock of change, for it cools, stiffens, bloats … … we are climbing … Stone curves in my flesh, roots into veins, the leaves humming in my lungs, rubbing at the lists of time … … indeed we name it in the margin of our measures: the caught, the fleeting, the stronger light. These hours. The cadaver lends us his eyes.

(70)

The prose poem ‘Dear body’ brings us back to the mind, but again underscores the importance of the physical body as a cradle for any mindful awareness of being:

And Body, please, as well, that single / thought, let me carry it, let me run with it, roll with it, in the / wide fields of the skull, this thought that cannot breathe / without you. (78)

The last section of SkinNotes, ‘The heart’ excavates the languages of feeling and love. It completes a circle through which the volume returns from foregrounding individual experience, to reflecting on the connections between us. The opening poem, ‘To say I believe in you’ depicts such connection with delicious quirkiness (91). Two people, whether lovers or mother and daughter, perhaps, become prairie dog-like, bobbing in and out of subway entrances. Again the nonhuman world is harnessed for metaphorical uses, but in Lang’s hands it becomes more than an adjunct to the human, rather those two people, surrounded by the city, move closer to it – they become ‘tree bugs’, ‘tectonic plates’ (91). Finally, majestically, Lang fuses, in the poem, the thinking and the physical ‘blood’ of human existence, into one who is not just an individual person, but two people, intrinsically, inseparably connected:

You’re right under me. You’re beside me. You’re all through me.  I’m …

(91)

Sometimes the parties Lang connects become ambiguous. Primed by what has come before, a reader begins to hesitate in assigning anthropomorphic values to language. In ‘Finding you’, for example, we might typically read the following as though it is a metaphor for human lovers. In Lang’s hands, however, sand and water are returned to being just themselves; yet readers have now been given a rare power to profoundly recognise their intrinsic being as objects not necessarily contingent on human subjectivity.

Your sand rolls over buried stones, fragments of broken shell, my crumpled waves finding you, arms reaching out

(94)

SkinNotes is a wonderful book. It really does nudge the boundaries of language and perception; in this way is has almost shamanic qualities. It might very well herald an epistemological shift into a different way of looking at humanity’s place within a vast, beyond-human world. It is also full of rich and tender observations and detailed nuances. In ways that remind me of Virginia Woolf’s writing, Lang seems to offer such an accurate portrayal of humans and the world that encloses them, that much will always remain to reward future reading and re-reading.

The poems in this collection are lyrics of emotional and intellectual force. Kelly speaks with a quiet intensity, her language pared down, her images precise and evocative. As in her previous collection Passion Painting: Poems 1983-2006, her subjects vary from witty insights into the human condition, to closely observed meditations on nature. All are drawn from a broad range of experiences. Vital and carefully crafted, the ‘I’ is ever-present in her poetry as she centres herself in the world around her.

In ‘Wallwork’ she engages the reader with the idea of ‘days laced with brick’ the metaphor extended with wit and humour.

These are square small days laced with brick across which I line with a precise nozzle a few epithets pointed towards a passing tram and their freight the humming fingertapping minds crammed between their own brick face

Many poems are personal reflections on ageing: an ailing body and hearing problems are considered with insight and wise acceptance. In her metaphysical poem ‘Small Rooms’ she takes us back to an image from her early life in England. The body’s weaknesses are compared to locks on a river. This metaphor continues to build to the end of the poem.

My ills inhabit small rooms of the body inflamed joint-capsule atrial fibrillation vestibular labyrinthitis the currents of intelligence and juice pass through these narrow locks and I attempt to control on deck beaten about the face by sun and sleet and leave the steering to the autonomic horse trudging as ever along the towpath …

She compares the noise in the witty poem ‘Whirr’ to a constant sound in the ears, like a winged bird. The sound ‘chough’ is both the muffled sound inside the ear and the name of a black bird. Kelly has found the perfect sound to enliven the metaphor. Noun and verb are inter-changeable. Punctuation is minimal.

Some small whirring being is drilling a hole into the night’s silence. Wing of feather perhaps or wing of dust … The whirr churns itself deeper under hearing into a quieter quiet, its nest of safety ─ it has no care for the matter it drives into as it choughs and choughs itself to peace.

Birds feature in many poems in this collection. Small details are captured in short lines and musical language. Kelly works this magic again in ‘Moment Journal’ a group of short haiku-like observations at the end of the book.

Thrush in my stone bath each dusk her song fountains like water from flicked wings A dry leaf scuttles wind-turned across the mulch bed practising scrub wren Gang gangs fire and steel Gently he nibbles her ear with his hammer beak

In another poem she presents the ‘Scrub wren’ as ─

A teaspoon of alpha male who strikes at windows claiming territory from his mirrored self, invader

Another bird poem ‘A twirl of air’ begins with a striking metaphor for Spring.

A grin of sky has split the heavy air and wattlebirds keeps falling out plunging through the banksias like rocks into water …

There are also poems that express Kelly’s concerns for the future of the natural world. But unlike those in her earlier books, these are brief poems, the short lines enjambed, the language compressed. In ‘Dry winter’ we are asked to ‘wait and see’ the results of climate change.

In a difficult season the camellias are blooming with an air of desperation and a heavy waft of sweetness. The earth quakes of course. This is the drill: stand in a protecting overarch or doorway wait to see what befalls on the other side.

Kelly brings insight and wisdom to these carefully tuned lyrics. The fragility of the Australian landscape is evoked in ‘Oxbow’, the opening poem in this book. She gives a persona to this shrinking pool, that accepts ‘windlash and the plump of rainfall’:

it has lost touch with any idea of ocean It has freed itself from the hard dark fists of the turbulent river

In the celebratory series ‘Autumns seasonal’, cadence and rhythm drive this sensory experience of nature and seasonal change. In the last stanza of the third poem ‘Spray can’, she evokes a personal experience.

Autumn comes in sunflushed and salty fruitful and not yet mellow its air is rich with insect flip … whining past into the human ear or disgust up the nose or on the tongue. Autumn begins full of Summer’s loose ends.

Other poems, such as ‘Stiction – Making books 1’, look back to memories from her early life, taking us to a classroom during the ‘restrictions’ in Britain during World War II. Here we see Kelly at her linguistic best. Rhyme and witty half-rhymes together with the repetition of vowel sounds, evoke a child-like playfulness.

As Mixed Infants we learned to salvage sticking finger across thumb with Clag or Gloy to clog and cloy, drag and annoy and paired with bluntnosed scissors to make books from smeared and scrappy cuttings or soaked off labels sorted into hobbies.

Theses word rhymes continue in ‘Past up’ as she compare this powerful sensory memory to the ease of mechanical photo-shopped image.

Virtual cut-and-paste smells nothing like this… gives nothing to the clipping hand no pull and push of metal today I pinned a donkey head above a svelte suit like young jack-in-the-office who saw me just a queue. On my screen the fit is seamless.

There are poems that also point to future concerns. Kelly questions our reliance on computer technology and the social value of instant communication. In ‘The New you’ she warns of ‘anxious news’ that ‘slaps you on the wrist’.

Ignore all bulletins and bullets … What’s needed now is therapy … This is the life when you Google up neurotherapy and ebay wants to get it for you.

Finally, ‘Distant relations’ leaves her questioning technology as a force for change. Will it draw us closer together; bring ease and certainty to our lives?

Silent across country and another and others mapped by news and documentaries

unacknowledged by the click of emails

Where are you now? Your water cooler is not wired to mine Who should I ask for gossip in a separate demonic

The title poem ‘Fire work’ also leaves the reader with a warning for the future. It is a metaphysical contemplation on the work ‘fire’ can do. There are spaces, places ‘where word and the fire exist’. Initially these are places of comfort, fire observed as a symbol of love and security. In poem 3, she leaves us with ‘fire as a word’, hidden and destructive.

To survive in landmine country walk humbly several steps behind the foraging goat or pig which are your means of life but not your life itself. You hold them out you offer them to mitigate the scarcely seeable flash the pulse of fractured air that screams your mortal ear.

These last poems of Aileen Kelly, written from 2006 until her death in 2011, are free and at times startling in their accuracy. This collection is representative of the full range of the artist’s voice and reveals new directions in the force and brevity of her language. Thanks should go to the editors and publishers who have brought these last poems to the page. In the ‘Acknowledgements’, the editor explains that these seventy five poems are just a small selection from Aileen Kelly’s final works. On reading through the book, I found the poems do not always sit well together. Perhaps this is due the selection process, which involved many people: her family, friends and other poets. The final edit was clearly a long, difficult process. This is however, a worthy tribute to one of Australia’s foremost poets. As a teacher and mentor Aileen Kelly leaves a legacy and challenge to future generations of poets, who will also look to the lyric as a personal form to confront or understand our varied and challenging experiences of life.

Now, poets rehearse for us ] ]

('Blason', 66)

Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is visceral, layered and driven by word constructs in an innovative lexicon of erotic topoi, ready to be open to contemporary interpretative potential – previously unworked. The poet J. H. Prynne wrote, '[W]here the practice of poetry [is] under intense pressure of innovation and experimentation … [we] discover new reflex slants and ducts and cross-links that open inherent potentials previously unworked.'[1]

Let me begin with a few questions and a little dialogue:

—Can we understand what an innovative poem means?

—We usually want to understand, interpret, ascribe meaning to a poem and we usually want the words to tell us something, but perhaps it could be different.

—How?

—There is another way to get to the 'it' of the poem – through an encounter.  An encounter with the language 'it' self and its materiality. We can consciously put aside our search for meaning.

—But is the encounter the meaning itself?

—It is. And, is not.

—Well, what is the 'it'? Is it the thing the poet is getting at – or something else?

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari never ask what 'it' means, nor look for 'anything to understand in it … [they] ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does …'. [2]

—So, what do these poems function with and what do they connect with? Are you saying I can have an encounter with the poem, (i.e. the other 'thing' it does) which asks me to respond to the work and make connections through the many sensations it produces, assimilating its linguistic materiality?

—Yes, it’s like a 'versification of experience'.[3]  Here’s Cassidy’s 'Thick mirror’.

Bolt soft/bush glass/tear

mat/bent black/flash teat/thin mass

low/peak/ripple shot/limp cot/rubber

bulb/flipper tint/crack yam/bright

roots/short blink/back

box/sharpen streak/

silver work/digitd

rop/wrinkled sham/

mistik crap

(42)

— you can see that Cassidy’s poem has its own force and shapes its own effect on you. It functions as an experience of sense-making through an encounter with words. The words refuse to meet your expectations; you have to ask yourself what the poem generates and engage with the poem on its own terms, materially – through its textual landscape.

—Yes, I can see, hear and feel that. So, it doesn’t have to be representational – it can confound me, confound my expectation and even be outside my frame of reference! Why then has Cassidy chosen the epigraph 'Nature is a language, can’t you read?'

—My interpretation is that Cassidy recognises we dwell in (and are of) two landscapes – language and earth-world. In this collection she makes connections between earthly nature and contemporary culture. Her work is a bodily-languaged expression where she stretches the syntax, working toward the Derridean conception that the written word and the concepts are positional, unstable and ephemeral. Cassidy also fashions a language as a phenomenology, the qualities of which we might understand in Husserl’s terms as – 'expressive' and 'indicative', where the indicative sign is in some ways a private language. In other words, an indicative sign is a sign to something, the recognised content is the 'meaning'; whereas an expressive sign is a sign of something, of an animating intention that it is expressing [4] — the connection with the other things it does, as referred to earlier by Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, Cassidy in her use of language does not 'break the bounds of poetry altogether. [Cassidy places] … language under intense pressure [to create] new work, [and a] new hybrid of...reference and discovery',[5] and if we approach her poetry with openness then the poem opens itself to us.  French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas thought of language not as representation but a means to proximity, as a physical contact if you like, as if language were corporeal like a face or human skin. 'The proximity of things', he writes, 'is poetry'.[6] Cassidy’s proximity is the syntactical composition of a cultural landscape. I read the following lines from the title poem ‘Chatelaine’ as indicative of the oeuvre of this collection –  a language of bodily encounter. Her verse exposes a contradictory interpretative meaning, illustrating a transient language which at the same time is analogous to changeable cultural and natural landscapes and their associated poetic vocabularies. Here, for example, 'Beware the heath' (2) the meaning of which belongs to a community who understands the lexicon. In Stanza 5, 'a healthy young noodle / and a happy wee goose come trolling; / monk-free at last, and mutually assured' (2-3), and in Stanza 8, 'gagging over my trowel – / the low ghost spoofs from me' (3), are representative of this private language. The final stanza

Here I am and here I drink. Sit down and taste my meat, say what I am called.

(4)

reveals another multi-layered construct. Cassidy has linguistically sketched a picture of a 'world', a place overseen by the mistress of the household, the oikos, prompting an interpretation to beware the will-full words of analysis — 'Beware the heath / of wilful words: / an analytic grave.' (2) — toward which reductionist, hedonistic thinking about the earth-world might lead.

—Surely then, the meaning of the poems might be lost if the vernacular is not understood?

—This is a possibility. It could be akin to the accusation levelled at the Cambridge School poets (and poetry) by  poets and critics working in the mainstream where they labelled the genre as  '… a deliberately inaccessible mode of writing … often held to be "only about language itself" and written purely for the delectation of a smug coterie of reclusive adepts'.[7]  But view Cassidy’s collection through the lens of linguist Edward Sapir who argues that as 'language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor [then as] every language has its distinctive peculiarities, the innate formal limitations — and possibilities — of one literature are never quite the same as those of another'.  Sapir further comments on the different layers of language – the content and conformation.[8] If a poem is an easy experience for the reader then it is given meaning without losing too much; but if a poem makes use of the idiosyncrasies or irregularities of language then it requires a different engagement. On the whole, poetry tends toward expressiveness rather than toward clarity, always with possible simultaneous and compound meanings.  For example, 'I am polishing my hoard, digging' (3) could warrant a contemporary interpretation as a post all over someone’s Facebook wall, or it could mean what you make of it, whatever you see in it, experientially and or referentially.

— How then do you reconcile landscape as a recurring theme in Cassidy’s poetry?

—Look at the cover of her collection! An upended image, the inverted expectation, the provocation of what Edward Casey terms our '“spatial framework” whereby [we] link up most pervasively with the place-world.'[9] Cassidy is cognisant of how we go about placing our bodies in the (natural and sexual) landscape. Here, for example in the short poem ‘Shut-eye’,

In my best version she nails a headland between my bronzers and I slump to the ceiling grinning claws going tat tacky tachy:

(32)

or in the ‘Study of a man’s right shoulder, breast and upper arm’ (60), '(and behold, I come quickly)'. Other examples from ‘Entrance (1988)’ (65), 'Strains of gutworthy / crescendo onto your / chenille, …' or in ‘Moods (wet dream)’ (68), and ‘Arete’ (71), 'Here I am again in you', exemplify the point Edward Casey makes where he writes ' … because we have both body and landscape, place and self alike [we] are enriched and sustained, [in] the place-world to which we so fatefully belong'.[10]

—Do you think her poetry is figurative, linguistically self-reflexive and experiential?

—Yes, Cassidy works on compound levels. ‘Lighten up’ de-scribes the dissolution of a village and its environment where:

Now its eyes have been fucked out, as the villagers say, and the offshore wind pumps through them, into my hair. Close up, the thing improves—triangulated and useful like exhumed lumber, stirring. I arrange old gum and tickets around its lips, and drink.

(41)

Here Cassidy evokes wind turbines on hilltops and submerged wood in hydro dams, being brought to the surface ('exhumed') and sold ('I arrange old gum and tickets around its lips'). This poem is about change, flux and the entanglement of the human and other-than-human. It is a remonstration against environmental desecration and cultural dissolution – a recurring theme in Cassidy’s work, particularly in her sharply drawn and intellectually robust work Final Theory.[11] Her self-reflexivity occurs through a range of poetic expressions (noticeably poets and poems) meant to engage and challenge her vocation and composition.

—Where is the encounter in the poem ‘Nightwork’ (31)?

—One always has a linguistic encounter with a poem, or prose for that matter — but with poetry it works on a different level. Paul Celan describes the encounter with poetic text as a 'mystery' [12] but this mystery is not mysterious. As Deleuze clearly writes, it is the encounter that makes us think, it is sensed, as opposed to recognised.[13] It is a process of de-territorialising our thinking and order-words, it disrupts our habits of recognition, providing what Deleuze refers to as the 'conditions of a true critique and a true creation'.[14]  Lines from ‘Nightwork’ where

A conveyor belt reaping into action, cries ‘rubbish rocks rubbish rocks’

(31)

de-familiarise our ordinary perception of a conveyor belt moving rocks, where the clattering sounds of the rocks on the conveyor evoke audible cries, 'rubbish rocks rubbish rocks'.

—How do you read the epigraph 'Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?'

—There are several possible readings, but given Cassidy’s previous work it makes me think she is writing about earthly change, the movement of the lands-scape, particularly in her allusions to the element of water which traces fluidly throughout the body of her work, as in ‘Mostly water’ (43-45) — 'our hydrogen bonds. / I’m mostly water / as you know' (44); ‘Nether’ (17-21) — 'My face was tripped / with open water, buds caught in its / mouths' (19); and ‘Floored’ (51) — 'she never drowns but makes another cliff' (51).

—So finally, how do you think Cassidy is developing her work?

—As I mentioned before, the Derridean idea of ephemeral and unstable language where linguistic meaning cannot be bound to time and place disarticulates for me a fully realised collection. One wonders if Cassidy’s erotic topoi will be as timeless as Judith Wright’s ‘Woman to Man’ — 'the blaze of light along the blade'.[15]  Nevertheless, Cassidy’s credentials as an ecopoet are ever present. Her skill and conceptual insight manifest in the exemplary ‘Nether’ (17), where each line fulfils the multiple technical and imaginative criteria toward which her previously unworked language makes for important poetry. As Sapir writes, 'When the expression is of unusual significance, we call it literature.'[16] If, as Shelley writes 'poets, not otherwise than philosophers … are, in one sense, the creators and, in another, the creations of their age'[17], then Cassidy has succeeded in being both a contemporary creator and a creation of our age.

Sometimes a poet’s past is like bitumen in summer, an expanse that gets us nowhere fast, but this energetic collection is written very much in the here and now. The poems refer to past events and past ideas, but reading them is very much an exercise in the present tense. We are being told stories about people – that’s the base line.

The first section is childhood: Barbie dolls, horses, first menstruation, and a defiant refusal to satisfy a crowd of jeering boys.

Later, the sun setting, the pool deserted, the ladder mine, I climbed and jumped, climbed and jumped.

(‘The high board’, 14-15)

In 'Embodied', the poet tracks her body to middle age, ending with ‘On chemistry’, listening 'to my body’s late verse, … like someone / talking over their shoulder as they / quit the room, leaving the door / slightly    ajar' (38).

The HZ Holden owner’s manual gives us the first of some found poems, ‘Why I like talking with mechanics’:

Gearstick   Gearbox   Honeypot   Donk Dipstick   Grease nipple   Big end   bush … Check the diaphragm for cracks or deterioration and/ renew as necessary.

(45)

Another found poem is ‘New York City T-shirts 2002’, a three-page compendium of unasked-for advice thrown in your face on the streets:

Religions of the World – … Protestantism: Shit won’t happen if I work harder

(64-66)

Another New York poem is the deceptively simple ‘Repetition injury’:

We see the camera see a man not looking as the airliner flies softly into the great glass building the man looks up too late we see again the camera see a man not looking … the last thing a man sees … we see it … again and again and again

(63)

‘Editress’ describes the (widespread, alas) habit of ever-so-clever chaps of using the creative writing scene as a vehicle for ramming their fantasies into a captive audience:

… sex, like it’s exciting just because it’s written. … At best they must not think a woman will read this. At worst, they do.

(108)

The seven-poem ‘Howard Arkley sequence’ is as vivid as Arkley’s paintings, and as varied. House fronts are flat and unescapable. The litany of drugs prefigures Arkley’s death on the brink of material success:

The drug of seeing The drug of paint on canvas … The drug of ownership The drug of control.

(‘How many drugs in this picture?’, 91)

The sequence ends with the irony of $190,000 for a painting:

For the price of that painting, you could live in it.

(‘Coda’, 93)

The collection closes with an essay on ‘Labelling Poetry’, abridged from a talk given in Wollongong in 2003. Williams quite rightly objects to how easily one label ­– such as ‘performance poet’ – can follow a poet around forever, usually without justification by the matter in hand. This helps nurture the ‘woman poet’ label by setting up an expectation that ‘poet’ means male poet, and that any other category requires an adjective – the word can’t stand alone except in that one instance. This happened with Williams (among many) and the label ‘peformance poet’; others have been permanently classed as ‘working-class poet’ or ‘page poet’, whereas ‘name poets and their ilk get by very well with no label at all’ (121).

In this spirit, remember that while poets don’t benefit from labels, it’s perfectly fine to try to label poems: in this book we see found poems, a coming of age poem, sad poems, concrete poems, and others. We see many that don’t fit into any category at all: these are cleanskin poems – or, if your dialect of English is the same as mine, maverick poems. They roam together and don’t belong to anyone but themselves. They have no brand burned into them, and they are very much alive.

It is stated on the cover that this book is Beverley Farmer’s last. If that is the case, it brings to a close a prose writing career of sustained ecological sensibility.

All five of the stories/ novellas in the book are related to myths and legends and feature a female main character, ‘opposing an oppressive authority’ (as noted in the blurb). The natural world is intrinsic in each story, as is death and the ‘otherworld’. There is much resonance throughout by the use of motifs such as water, blood, stone and light. Eggs, seals and swans also feature, as does a gold ring and a red silk dress. The book is beautifully written – detailed and poetic - yet some of the tales are stronger than others.

The first novella, ‘A Ring of Gold', is set in the place where Farmer resides – Point Lonsdale at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. It is a second and third person narrative about an elderly widow (in the last summer of her life) who spends much of her time at the beach. The novella is focused more on the natural world than on human characters, and respectfully so: ‘And so it is, the underwater, another world half-hidden in this one, a world of its own, and mirroring, matching, where one twitch of waterskin is enough to send hills and valleys warping to the horizon' (23).

In the narrative, this last summer is a very hot one: 'no one can remember a hotter one' (39), alerting the reader to the topic of climate change. ‘It is a long time since the last rainbow or fall of rain here, where time and the weather are coming to a standstill' (24).

The woman feels very connected to the ocean and often is in it, in her dreams and daydreams. ‘A heat wave floats you off into another life, swollen with lightness, diaphanous, a water being’ (41). Words and phrases such as ‘tide’, ‘shallows’, ‘living on the surface’ and ‘backwashes and rips’ about non-marine events re-occur in the story.

Woven throughout the novella are references to seals and silkies (in particular the Scottish myth of The Grand Silkie). Near the beginning of the narrative a bull seal appears on the sand. The seal, then, with, ‘a throat stretched wide, a ring of golden bone’ (6), twists back into the sea. The woman stands in shock: 'Before her eyes is the salmon-red gullet of the seal bared in a mute, a mutual scream of mutual recognition’ (7). Later, in a seeming reference to environmental destruction: ‘More and more ... she feels the presence of a swimming self who has hovered, open-armed like a bird over this sand, these rocks, time and time again and will again, its shadow in green shreds drifting over the dry sea floor’ (19).

The woman spends much time meditating on her past life. She reminisces about when her mother told her that puberty is the ‘same for all us mammals’ (13), and when she discovered that, ‘she was sprouting hair down there, dark fur. What on earth was she turning into, now?’ (15). In reference to a book on barnacles from childhood, she notes that intertidal periwinkles climb into shells after barnacles have died, ‘responding in the flesh to the memory of the tidal rhythms of that original place. How can a living thing in a blue crumb of a shell no bigger than the pupil of an eye have a knowledge of the sea so vast that it outweighs absence? ' (30).

In the novella, the connectedness between all living things, the cyclic nature of life and a blurring between life and death are all distinct ideas. A reference to Venice comes with the statement: ‘the way the world is going ... there will only be this one blue abolished world, a silence ... dead and swarming with life. Newborn’ (57).

The next entry in the book, ‘This Water,’ gives the collection its title. ‘This Water’ is based on Dairmuid and Graienne, the Irish myth dating back to the 10^th century about a triangle of lovers. The main character is a beautiful daughter of a high king who runs away with her love when she has been betrothed to a much older man. The young lovers live off the land, using magical rowanberries to survive.

Water as the essence of life is a theme of the story. The main character states that her lover died because of a lack of water. And, in later life, she says, ‘Sometimes when I close my eyes ... two cupped hands appear before me and water springs up in them and they are holding out this water. But when I bow my head ... at the touch of my lips. The water of life is gone’ (80). A fascinating scene refers to the first lover of the woman being revealed as water, not the man she has run away with: 'an icy splash surging up over my thighs and deep inside them’ (77). 'The marvel of this water! said I. How came it to be bolder and go further than the bravest of men has dared to go?’ (78).

This work in its content and style is a contrast to the first story. Written in the first person and narrative heavy, this story is the slightest entry in the collection, perhaps because a lack of direct speech has a distancing effect on the reader.

‘The Blood Red of Her Silks’, another novella, is the next tale in the collection. This novella, told by an all-knowing narrator, is a very touching and engaging one. There is quite an amount of dialogue in the text which may account for this reader feeling more for the characters than those in ‘This Water’. Set in an earlier period of Irish history than ‘This Water’, it refers to the myth, the Children of Lir. It is about four siblings who are changed into swans by a vengeful stepmother, and their relationship with a monk.

The wanderings of the swans in a variety of habitats / environs are described. ‘This water has a long memory’ refers to the lake where the swans had their transformation and: 'In some lights the unearthly green of this water reminds them of the green afterlife' (132). As the 900 years of their swanly life goes by, the

world is changing ... More fields of yellow and brown cloth have taken over the forest ... A seal tangled in kelp turns out to be ... a man, sleek and smooth, and a line of mourners file down to take him up and bring him home. The swans have never seen such people before. Is this what lies ahead when the spell ends? So be it, they say. (121-22)

The monk and the swans are very close (the changeling children in their swanly skins still speak and sing as humans). However, when the monk steals eggs at the start of one spring, ‘he hears the swans sorrowing overhead and his blood chills with understanding' (131). In a conversation with the eldest swan (a female) the monk says, ‘What lives in no matter what body is the soul’ (132). The placing of the monk in the story allows for a comparison of Christianity and a pagan world view. 'The universe is his handiwork’, says the monk and he refers to the swans as ‘apostles or angels’ (136).

‘Tongue of Blood’, based on a story from Greek mythology, is about Clytemnestra mourning the loss of her daughter by decree of her husband, the king Agamemnon, so that he could go to war in Troy. Clytemnestra has then taken the king’s life in revenge and is now dead, a shade in The Underworld, with no strength or purpose. The background to this tale – in a direct connection to ‘The Blood Red of Her Silks’ – is that Clytemnestra’s mother was Leda. Leda had four children – two girls and two boys – hatched from eggs, after Zeus (the God of Gods) in the form of a swan swooped and entered her, the same night as she was with her husband, Tyndareus.

The interweaving of grief with concepts to do with blood, water and stone is pervasive in the story. As well as The Earth, blood and stone are all written of as essences of life. ‘I avenged her whose blood cried out of the earth', says Clytemnestra. ‘If blood spills and sinks out of sight, it cries out for justice and the soles of the feet of all the living carry the stain over the earth' (176).

Prose, poetry and prose poetry are all employed in ‘Tongue of Blood.’ Therefore, the story has a looser, broader feel than the other narratives in the collection – for example, conventional punctuation is sometimes dispensed with. The writing is powerful but loses some of its power because of the amount of detail employed.

The last part of the collection, a novella entitled, ‘The Ice Bride’, has more of a narrative arc than ‘Tongue of Blood’. This novella, written in the third person, resembles the myth of Pygmalion. The gradual awakening of the wife of the Master of Snow and Ice to objects and concepts of the world outside her palace is engrossing and skilfully done. There is suspense and movement in the plot and the writing to do with water, stone, light and time is very beautiful, although some of the dialogue is not pithy enough and some detail could have been dispensed with.

The interconnectedness of matter is again emphasised in this narrative. ‘She waits, swaddled now in silk, now water, silken of skin, as she is and barely conscious of a distinction, silk, water, skin, it is all one’ (211). The Fool, a late appearing character, says to the woman, ‘Undo one such small matter as the behaviour of water and ... the rule is that you may undo the universe' (262).

Overall, in this book, there are clear references to humans’ interrelatedness and responsibilities to the natural world. Farmer is also an expert at rhythm, the use of metaphor and simile and of detail. However, less detail would have delivered more punchiness in a few of the tales.

On a first reading, Aurelia is quite a challenge. It is not a book to pick up for pleasure and read to fill in a few minutes. There are only twenty five poems, but they are tied together by the extravagant use of language, and in his 'Preface' Hawke provides a glimpse into reading his poetry, warning the reader 'the relationship between poetry and loss, by which to desire is to necessitate, even invoke, obscurity' (ix).

Even with this hint, these are difficult poems that at first reading are hard to understand, but with perseverance you may get a glimpse through the obscurity, or as Hawke so elegantly suggests, what we are reading is:

like the scaffolding of a lyric poem mounted briefly in a newspaper frame

('Pieta', 5)

There is a sense of ‘place’, but then is seems to disappear into memory seen through kaleidoscopic glasses,

The lake of charity, the ice cream sandwiches the moulting lagoon: it is all falling into the past inevitably, like the last pack of cigarettes you’ll ever buy

('Reliquary', 1)

and then descends into nostalgia, igniting a wistfulness that evokes a yearning. But a yearning for what, a return to the ever changing memory of childhood?

There is a crumbling border a child might walk tentatively, giddy with the danger of falling

('Emily Street', 25)                   

Or maybe even the ambiguity of mortality:

His signature is death. He wears Death’s photographs all over that unshaven chin. He is alone, a servant of powers beyond his reach.

('The Police-spy as an Owl', 30)

And again

Tonight I am grave as a graven image, cowled in the white wings of the Owl-king.

('Lignent', 21)

Even more explicitly, Hawke writes:

In the circuit of photographs, exchanging one generation for the next, locked in their age-differences perpetual children becoming their own grandchildren,       

('What Was There', 11)

This ambiguity of mortality is hinted at in 'The First Man into Hiroshima' (27) and Hawke's numerous references to photographs as the memory inculcates the image with its own poem to tell:

We sat beneath photographs tinted with a fading brush

('Mountain Train', 10)

The face of Bhopal in a ragged photograph white eyes blurred at the edges staring into invisible light.

('Death of Saint-Just', 31)

The idea of photograph, as the teller of truth, is muted by the ‘fading’ and the ‘ragged’ leading to the possibility of the loss of its vitality as truth, as truth encompasses the dream world always obscured within the image.

In these poems there is harking back to obscurity as a shroud loosely tossed over the gravestones of life’s loss,

I gaze across this emptiness studded with coloured lights, to find her again in a portrait silhouetted against a dying sky, the only photograph that survives

('Aurelia', 4)

In Hawke’s Aurelia, we are taken on a trip up a mountain that reaches the apex in the disturbing images of 'The Conscience of Avimael Guzman' (32) and falling off the other side with the final 'Black Highway' (39). This was not apparent with the first reading, but with reflection and rereading, this movement was discernible.

In his preface, Hawke writes, '[Lost] lives often coexist with our own as lost alternatives, counter-experiences or impossible possibilities; they lie within the everyday like a subtext, or a haunting' (ix), and he certainly draws out the damaged dreams that haunt our living, or possibly inhabit our ‘lost lives’:

I speak the empty name of this day in the rhetoric of memory where every word transforms its object into an echo of itself, the lament of endless night.

('Aurelia', 4)

These night dreams or remembered lives evolve into a desire to forget:

I did not stay long at this turning point: there were no good omens to be discovered.

('The Point', 20)

And yet in forgetting, we remember, not what is but what our fractured memory torments life with.

This seems to be a work of academic poetry and this is not a criticism but rather a pointer to understand the complexity of the poems. To read this book of poetry takes an effort, and to tease out meaning is well worth the effort. It is not populist poetry or performance poetry; this is experimental and requires effort on the part of the reader, but this should not put you off from reading Aurelia.

Getting by? Check. Not fitting in? Check. The title is a summary, and Wicks ends his book with the same sentiment:

Happiness passes for this state of acceptance. She is distracted. He has forgotten … Nobody fits in, the singular commonality. Yet we somehow interlock ­ that is the engine of our understanding. …

(‘The 6^th Intersection’,  94-96)

The collection – the poet’s thirteenth – is set into seven sections: 'The Company of Women', 'We Are Just Men', 'Narrative', 'Location', 'The Difficulties of Matt Kovacs', 'From Ms Tess Manning', and 'What Ends?'. On the surface, this arrangement seems to narrow the poems down from the general to the specific, but this book is more of a people-watching manual, written by an observer who is deeply discouraged by the passage of time and of the people he has met through his years.

In the opening poem – ‘In the Tribe’ – the company of women is broken down into the Treaty of the Mothers, the Treaty of their Partners, the Treaty of the Daughters, and the Law of Weeds. The poet’s observations and classification set the tone for the description of women in the rest of the book – with definite echoes (especially in using ‘tribe’) of 18^th century poet Christopher Smart’s cat.[1]  Jeoffry, like Wicks’ women, is an attractive but separate species, something to have fun describing but not to understand.

The women are good old girls of the hippie persuasion, unashamed of their bodies, armed with Facebook and Mastercard, keen for freedom and fulfilment:

She dances then goes, arrives at a new fire that was just so interesting. Solitude & the best of friends are her current studies. Her phd watches on like a guitar solo, it fails to mention the engine of empathy near her heart.

(‘This Woman’, 18)

They tend to speak in the first-person singular, about external matters (their bodies, their jobs, their purchases). They are individuals, girlish forever, but still individual.

The good old boys speak en masse, stomping up to centre stage, eyes cast modestly downward:

We are a problem that is not insurmountable. Should be managed with tolerance & vigilance … advised on appropriate clothes or counselled down to sensitivity (what we say is what we are?). … Lead us to your pleasure. We are better than cats for most household camaraderies.

(‘User Manual – Men’,  22)

In the third and fourth sections, we seem to have reached a balance: everyone is equal in face of the loss of their past and the futility of their present.

I try not to let the mind believe in its ghosts. Struggle to be filtered, safe & functional. Still they persist.

(‘Spooks’, 38)

We have netted infinity in words & science. It is a restless captive, our academics ponder the wisdom of the catch. But cannot let go: always they look back there, eyes, chattering, lost.

(‘Metaphysical Naturalism on a Very Good Day’, 50)

Matt Kovacs lives in the then and the now, travelling back and forth in his mind as he and Tess, his new love, travel to Thailand. Once upon a time, he knew that

Freedom’s just another word for unemployed. Les comes around with a smoke, us two have everything in common. …

(‘Matt’s Seventies’,  56)

His life has followed a familiar curve of lust, love, loss, fatherhood, estrangement, overseas, politics, ageing parents – and the later-in-life lover, all them subject to Matt’s contemplation.

Tess has questions of her own:

Am I a person? Here, on this doona late summer lightning tattoos the afternoon. Matt off working. I look down at my body … see weather radar.

(‘The Secret Life of Bar Staff’, 86)

Tess’ contemplation centres around her body – again, then and now –the men in her life, what they have done to her, what she has left, in Thailand or in Australia:

Often enough there’s a role for the blond farang … learnt to run in fuck-me pumps & say wodka … Tomorrow I’ll play a dead Briton who haunts the Mustang Club.

(‘Featuring Tess Manning – Bangkok Top Media Co.’, 92)

And we leave them there, Matt and Tess, like trapped insects scrabbling inside the glass of a kill-jar with the lid screwed tight down. Much of the book conveys a pessimism born of exhaustion (no call to action), and the poems – both the women and the men – come down on the line of least resistance.

At the end of the day, the boys remember cars, wars, failures and violence; the girls remember boys. And no one holds out hope for much of anything.

Deleuze, Guattari and Triffids

It heaves, lifting one organ at a time, every inch of the small intestines, followed by the large intestines, nudging and pulling, learning to use the rhythm between muscle and gravity. (5)

This quote, which appears on the cover of Tanya Thaweeskulchai’s book A Salivating Monstrous Plant, is entirely emblematic of the poem. It heaves and tears itself in multiple directions at once, yet relentlessly moves forward, as Sean Pryor, in the book’s 'Introduction', notes (xii). Made-up of five sections, each comprising multiple smaller prose poems, the work forms a cohesive whole, a complete organism, while never once allowing the reader to be blinded to the diversity of its parts. And it is here that I beg to differ from Pryor, who claims ‘Thaweeskulchai’s poem is not a puzzle’ (xii). I would suggest quite the reverse: for me it is a conundrum, the sort where if you shift one piece everything else changes. You’re at it all night, and think you’ve got it out, but you’re never quite sure and there’s no answers page. This, however, is what brings the work to life. It becomes an organic, living whole, writhing and boiling with possibilities; and that makes it fascinating, and far, far better than sudoko.

The tricky texts of the modernists, who played with the structures of language and favoured writerly ways of deconstructing language, have been much berated for causing poetry to slide from popularity. Thaweeskulchai indeed trains her Salivating Monstrous Plant by such techniques. It is not an easy book, and not one that will instantly appeal to many readers. It takes work, but I think that work repays the persistent reader well. As she says in the book’s 'Preface', Thaweeskulchai is interested in: ‘how …  language and the body [can] interact to extend beyond communication, verbal or otherwise?’ and how ‘[t]hese metaphors ... [can convey] sensory experience rather than symbolism’ (ix). The lines with which she opens the poem suggest this intent:

The sounds that appear at five-thirty with the crackling leaves, dust and dried mud speak of morning and of a red sun-lit garden. These noises conglomerate, building like a nest of waking vipers, their hissing jolts the plant once more from its near-sleep. (3)

Pryor points to the metaphorical workings of Thaweeskulchai’s words: morning sounds become viper-like, foreshadowing an awakening monster and stimulating real frisson in the reader (xi). Thaweeskulchai experiments with horror, a favourite genre of film makers, but unlike film-makers, she discards visual imagery and aural soundscapes in favour of pure linguistics. She tests the capacity of words themselves to convey sensory or emotional feeling using qualities like their symbolic associations, onomatopoeic effects and physical expression. These, as she suggests, might stimulate bodily sensation and communicate meaning in an entirely different way (or simply operate, beyond our capacity to make meaning). From a neuroscientific perspective, this might involve parts of the brain, like the limbic system, that can function independently from the thinking part, or frontal cortex. For example:

… then they delve in, gut-deep and going, through the layers that divide the organs, the fats that are keeping them from crushing each other, into the bloodstream, the cells and the plasma And the secret to seeing, this clotting of blood and the sealing of injury with metal crusting over skin – here, the slight angles in which he tilts his head, how his torso shimmies and feels its way through the laughter. (25)

I’m not entirely sure how successful these endeavours are, but then I have notoriously slow reflexes. We are not all the same though, and a response that manifests as a slight pricking in the skin for one, might bring on nausea in another. It is the same with the possible emotional effects of Thaweeskulchai’s writing; I hesitate to claim an understanding of what Thaweeskulchai means by the ‘… violence present in the act of speaking …’ (ix). Is the use of a word like ‘violence’ an act of valuing something that merely is? As a person who has spent a lot of time in the nonhuman world (the Tasmanian wilderness) I find it challenging to read either the ‘monstrous plant’ or its consumption of boy and crow as horrible. It seems that what Thaweeskulchai has done, rather, is transform this act into a kind of animate sublime, enabling us to contemplate our insignificance as individuals at the same time as apprehending humanity’s intricate connection to a much-greater-than-human world.

Thaweeskulchai’s formal control of A Salivating Monstrous Plant reinforces this effect by sensitising the reader to the way words suggest associations with other words and networks of ideas. What arises out of the poem is a dense but fragile Deleuzean mycorrhizae of potentialities. This effect is contributed to by the prose format. There is no easy way into or out of lines of thought. The reader is constantly drifting between ‘listening’ to the semantic meanings of words, and to their purely sensory effects. They are coaxed into looking beyond the overt narrative (the horrible advance of a monstrous, omnivorous plant engulfing boy, bird; a strange sort of Pilgrim’s Progress) towards some subtext – and possible subtexts abound. I found myself thinking: am I reading about a boy, or about something that feels like a boy; a plant, or myself, feeling like a monstrous plant? The poem also ripples, of course, with a vibrant sense of biological interconnectedness. It constantly traverses liminal regions between subject and object, organ and organism, thing and ecosystem. The individual poems, for example, shift back and forth between narrative personas – first, second, third; back and forth; and these are both human and nonhuman. The effect of this is that the work manifests as a polyphony of voices, voices that speak both through their utterances, and their silence –

Half-boy, half-crow, maybe this co-dependence will finally kill him. The crow part of him sings, he feels the notes vibrate through his vocal cords, the caw-caw resounds and is taken up by others. Finally, he opens his mouth, and drawing from his diaphragm: it bellows, the long unending sound. … The calligrapher stands to the side, wonders at a world in pieces – there’s an honest question, but not one pretty or substantial or courageous enough to be uttered, not even in one’s head; so now, a crow and the no-longer-laughing-boy, a monstrous plant that crawls and brings with it a poisonous forest, they put their heads down to rest. It’s not muteness, no, but the decision not to speak . . . (68)

In Vibrant Matter (2010) Jane Bennett writes of the power of nonhuman ‘things’ to ‘look back’, making the observer aware that they have their own subjectivity, and empowering them to catalyse a response, or become actant (vii, 2, 9). Despite the ostensible implausibility of a giant salivating plant and the horror-genre, mesmeric appeal of Thaweeskulchai’s triffid-like creation, her poem brings to life a very realistic world that indeed ‘looks back’ at the reader, making us aware of its similarity to the actual world we humans occupy. It opens thrilling possibilities for wider study, but, unfortunately poetry books aren’t something you just stumble across when you’re browsing in the local newsagent; so getting your hands on A Salivating Monstrous Plant is likely to take some effort. This begs the question, who is this book for?

I have a history with toxic and carnivorous plants (I once shared an office with hundreds of them, and much work-time was devoted to rescuing skinks from salivating green maws). This explains why the title caught my attention. The cover is strangely cool though; like a sampling from a botanical specimen book. It contributes to making the volume look somewhat perplexing. A Monstrous Salivating Plant is, though, along with everything else it offers for those willing to read slowly and ponder, a gracefully told horror story. It is as unique and memorable, I think, as John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids or the Jan Svankmajer directed film Little Otik (Otesanek, 1996). It will surely appeal to lovers of the genre who also enjoy a puzzle and to think about our relationship with the nonhuman, as it is completely contemporary in its philosophical resonance, bringing to mind great speculative fiction like that of Ursula le Guin or Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

Like the definition of ‘poetry’, the definition of ‘Nature’ has retained its ‘freedom’ from being expressed and explained in a couple of words.

Contemporary poetry favours free forms not inundated by rhetorical terms. Without bringing Sean O'Carroll’s Lucid Nature under the technical microscope of stressed and unstressed syllables, one can still enjoy the progressive expression of varied feelings of the poet, feelings that manifest subtly, provoking deep thoughts.

Lucid Nature, a collection of poems written by O'Carroll in Wild Dog Valley, would have nicely accommodated a few words of introduction as to it being poems written by the poet who worked towards re-wilding Wild Dog Valley, a 65 acre property in South Gippsland, Australia, land that was almost given up for cattle grazing.

The poet’s intentional togetherness with Nature to understand life in a better way has made him to create a wild-path for the reader to appreciate elegant Nature, too. Equipped with the knowledge of the geographic details of the valley, Nature in all its suddenness, ecological elements, spirituality and the likes, the poet trudges along, gathering the spirits of imagination, weeding out misconceptions, recognising nature right from grassroots.

146 poems with titles are grouped under, ‘Nature’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Relationship’, ‘Self’, ‘Men’, ‘Living’, and ‘Being’. Lucid Nature opens with the poem, ‘That’s where I’ll be’ (14). Creating a clear picture of Wild Dog Valley, the poet beckons the reader to experience surrounding Nature, instructing all the while, yet, sweeping in an air of warmth like an appreciative host:

Stay close to the wall If you don’t wish to fall And make for the peak that you see

(14)

The poet cautions the reader about experiencing ‘intended loneliness’ with Nature, an art to be acquired and practiced to perfection in order to appreciate the experience:

And alone at the top With the wolves and the gods And the wild ones That’s where I’ll be

(14)

There is not a single point in the poem that detracts the reader from the central focus of the narrative.

As if in continuation, the second poem, ‘Lucid Nature’ (15) follows beautifully, enhancing rather than enforcing the familiar imagination of the poet. He says;

You do not respect nature You do not trust nature You do not love nature You cannot regard nature in this way Anymore than a river can have feelings for water

(15)

This reminds me of the philosopher Confucius.

Confucius defined ‘Shu’ both positively and negatively. In a negative sense he said: 'What you do not wish others to do unto you, don’t do it to others.' Speaking positively, he said: 'What you wish to do for yourself, do it to others. … Help others as you would help yourself.' He did not speak of 'doing unto others as you want others to do unto you', because he thought that one’s own conscience should be the origin of good deeds (Wang 1968, 23).

Applying Confucian understanding, this can also be interpreted as: 'If disrespected, nature does not respect you / If distrusted, nature does not trust you / If un-loved nature does not love you / If regarded in the way as done at present, nature cannot have anymore feelings than that as water to river'. The poet continues:

To be fully human Is to fall With intention You are after all Lucid nature

(15)

Trying to uncover the meaning of life, possibly through Nature, the poem, ‘It is not nature I crave’ (16) states:

It is not nature I crave But truth Though truth abounds In nature

(16)

The poet, as narrator, expresses his concern that the truth he is seeking is not outside but is reflected within:

And The mirror of the city Is fogged The mirror of nature Clear

(16)

Lines that describe the repetitive tenor of the poet’s unpretentious intentions are:

Every man ought spend A year in the woods

(19-20)

These lines appear in the poem, ‘A year in the woods’(19), dedicated obviously to the man who made the woods famous, Thoreau. To feel connected to Nature, to experience special insight, the poet asks the reader:

Sit in stillness, with Nothing to accomplish Find that birds, do Not speak gibberish Let the stream caress his dreams And nurse his childhood wounds

(19)

To satisfy the self by being with Nature, is to understand poet’s view:

A year in the woods May not make him whole But will fix some of what’s broken And help him see That what is said Is more than what is spoken Every man ought spend A year in the woods

(20)

Modulating syllables and sounds harmonically in the poem, ‘The wind’, the poet adds an enchanting imagery,

The wind Taps me on the shoulder Like an old friend Gesturing towards the natural world

(29)

With its likeness to ballad, the poem, ‘The city makes us small’ (30), reads like music with reason, acting on one’s conscience. 'The city makes us small / Blocks out all horizons / And dampens every star? / The city makes us small' (30). This pattern continues locking one’s thoughts within the brackets of ‘The city makes us small’, and keeps changing the train of thoughts at each turn of a paragraph.  The poet establishes the fact:

The city makes us small The city makes us fools There’s a wisdom in the woods A knowing that’s worth knowing

(32)

The poet sings perception of harmony in ‘An ode to white butterflies’ (37), and conveys with internal rhymes, the true meaning of Nature in ‘The nature of nature’ (48).

Lucid Nature keeps up the regular rhythm and maintains tempo nicely, but, somewhere down the poetic valley, the focus of the poet shifts, towards art of poetry, relationships, spirituality, quest for the meaning of ‘I’, the self, familial bonds, purposes in relationships and such other materialistic, inexhaustible variety of ideas.

Inevitably, the reader loses track amidst Wild Dog Valley, because of the poet’s irrepressible excitement.

A syllogism can be drawn here: ‘Lucid Nature’ is one of the finest empathetic eco-poems in Sean O' Carroll’s year long collection of poems while staying in Wild Dog Valley. Not all poems in Lucid Nature are empathetic eco-poems.

Lucid Nature’s poet is a promising poet in the making. There is a literary perception of Johnsonean principles of Unity that could be applied to the appreciation of Poetics too. But there is this concept of Poetic License.  Sean O' Carroll’s understanding of Consensus Nature Philosophy will enchant the futuristic literary world, his thoughts appealing more to heart than to just conscious feelings. I am reminded of Johnson’s words:

Dryden remarks that Milton has some flats among his elevations. This is only to say that all the parts are not equal. In every work one part must be for the sake of others; a palace must have passages, a poem must have transitions. It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a succession of day and night. Milton, when he has expiated the sky, may be allowed sometimes to visit the earth; for what other author ever soared so high or sustained his flight so long? (Johnson 1779: 210)

The inspiration behind Canberra’s Recent Work Press is Shane Strange. In a world where print publication opportunities for the collections of first time, or early-career, poets are extremely competitive this Strange exuberance is a most exciting intervention.

This series of books, all impeccably produced, retail for only $12.95 each. The cover designs, the quality of the paper, and the clarity achieved by new printing technologies, all compliment each other to create the most beautiful books. These are books that could be judged by their covers.

Recent Work Press is allied with IPSI (International Poetry Studies Institute) and Canberra University’s dynamic Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. And Shane Strange launched all of these titles at the recent festival, ‘Poetry on the Move: Boundary Crossings’, hosted by IPSI and Canberra University. The press seeks a vibrant place within the Canberra poetry scene, so it is not surprising to find that four of these six poets are based within the ACT: Monica Carroll, Miranda Lello, Moya Pacey and Maggie Shapley. Penny Drysdale is originally from Victoria but now lives in Alice Springs, while Charlotte Guest is a Western Australian. Five of these titles are debut collections; only Moya Pacey has published previously (The Wardrobe with Ginninderra Press in 2010). Recent Work Press does not only publish women writers. They have also published collections by such poets as Owen Bullock, Paul Hetherington and Paul Munden, but the titles collected here for review were launched together as a series and so I choose to review them together.

Monica Carroll’s Isolator is a collection of creative and experimental micro-texts (presented in a variety of fonts that also often incorporate visual text). There is no contents page and no individual poem titles. This book demands to be read in one roller coaster sitting. There are letters, jokes, riddles, aphorisms, lists and prose poems. The book’s tone slips between sly wit and serious social commentary. Carroll’s interrogation of conservative family values and gender politics is startling.

Carroll tells us, near the book’s opening, that she is ‘feeling pretty ballsy’ and in a way that often ‘makes me act up wild’ (2) and that she has ‘burrowed through the arse of this book, looking for you’ (4). This wicked sense of humour and energy runs through much of Isolator. But this is not a book crafted for easy entertainment. In one poem we are told:

If the object is to family oneself with corruption – and I mean this in the moral sense – the choices are infinite. You dress your children in bruises. Or play grown-up games with their child parts. Record your grooming. Confine them. Stuff them. Starve them. Watch them lie for you. Watch them bleed. Use plain old blackmail – the black kind – if you’re a tad weary. Try to wreck them while you have the chance. Family is the polite word for hostage. We all have to do them –

have them done to us.

(Isolator 28)

This is an unsettling piece of writing. The plain, matter-of-fact, language that conveys such emotional carnage brings me undone. And there are many texts that interrogate sexual violence, pedophilia, and the difficulties experienced by those without power to say ‘no’. In one prose poem Carroll describes the gang rape of a young person by a football team. This text concludes with: ‘The captain, ready to shower, stuffed his cock into my mouth. In court they asked me if he had an erection. // At home, Uncle asked me why I didn’t bite. He knows why’ (51). The ending of this text has devastating impact. And the interrogation of this sexualised abuse of power is nuanced and often takes us to unexpected places. In another text Carroll tells us: ‘Come to bed. I need you to suck me off, he said. / I follow to avoid a fight. / While he slept I lay strands of cotton across his throat. // It’s not abuse if you don’t say no’ (70). This is evocative of the manipulations that characterise so many of our personal relationships. It forces us to examine the abuses of power that take place, not only in the violence of rape, but also in our intimate consensual relationships, considering once again the priorities of respect and care for one other.

In Dew and Broken Glass, Penny Drysdale writes texts that we more comfortably identify as poetry. This is not to say that she does not also experiment, with punctuation for example, but her book is more conventional than Carroll’s. Drysdale moved from Victoria to Alice Springs in 2010, when she began work with the Akeyulerre Healing Centre, and her book is a lyrical reflection on what it has been like to cross these boundaries: both physical and cultural. Drysdale writes often of her welcome into Arrernte community and country. Her poem, ‘sunday morning’, begins:

I have just spent the night on this land with this land the sky spinning or is it me spinning

(Dew and Broken Glass 7)

There is an evocative richness in this plain language that works wonderfully to orientate us to Drysdale’s anxieties about cultural sensitivity. This poem is a powerful way of ‘saying thank you’ (8). In another poem, ‘along the river’, Drysdale begins:

come closer | newcomer | and see | dew | broken glass nestled along the river | glistening | steam rising | dew and broken glass | orange peel twisting away from you | like a child afraid of a stranger | a car battery with its teats exposed | an orange price tag lying in the red dirt | as if this land has a price | a spider web as small as a baby’s fist …

(Dew and Broken Glass 11)

This is a delicate evocation of a first walk, a moment of enculturation, along the Todd River. Drysdale sees beauty in the (littered) natural world, juxtaposing the sadness of dispossessed peoples, who now camp in a dry riverbed on the edges of town, with their suppressed knowledge and custodianship of country. The replacement of traditional punctuation markers with those vertical lines serves to fragment the poem, hinting at colonialism’s disruptions. In other poems Drysdale confronts, more head-on, the brutalities located in the ‘gap’ between white and black Australia. In ‘somewhere’ she writes:

she called me by mistake at 10.30 trying to get hold of her daughter this new phone is all messed up we had both had a few drinks I was safely in my bed in my book blinds drawn eyelids almost down she was somewhere out there somewhere – perhaps at home –where anything          could          happen

(Dew and Broken Glass 38)

The weight of domestic violence is another consequence of colonialism’s devastation. Amidst this damage, however, Drysdale praises the numerous examples of First Australian resiliency and pride. In ‘sing up the sun’ she writes:

old lady sings up the sun then jokes with the sun while we lay in our swags at the end of the veranda she speaks in arrernte and english so we can understand something of this crazy marriage as she coaxes and cajoles him to rise and I grow certain if she doesn’t sing the sun will not rise in this country hush now she might sing you up too

(Dew and Broken Glass 91)

This is such a simple, and deeply felt, love song to the Arrernte, and an expression of gratitude for their welcome and generosity. There is wonder in these lines as they open the constrictions of self to lay bare the many contradictions in Australian relationships. Drysdale crosses boundaries with a postcolonial sensitivity that is both textured and affirming in its vibrant use of language.

In Soap Charlotte Guest writes a beautifully lyrical and imagist poetry that is finely tuned to the concerns of a contemporary young woman: sex, body image, gender politics, family relationships and the loss of friends. And, like Drysdale, she is attentive to praising the role of the matriarch in certain non-western societies, in a way that is aware of romanticised ideas, but also keenly knowledgeable of the place of older women as singers of community and country. So Guest begins her poem ‘Harvest’:

The strongest women on earth farm the cassava. They sing the root from the ground against empty bellies and the prospect of rot.

(Soap 1)

This poem echoes back beautifully to Drysdale’s ‘sing up the sun’ and is a fine celebration of female strength and creative agency. ‘Harvest’ concludes with a clever humour that juxtaposes western consumerism with these women who ‘sing up their lives’. In ‘Networking Drinks’ Guest continues with this tone as she writes a clever satire on a conversation between an empowered young woman and a ‘confidant boy with flushed / capillaries’ whose ‘eyes bulge’ as she begins to challenge his sexist values. The poem brilliantly ends:

Have the last fifty years meant nothing? I open my mouth and push bubbles out. We are talking underwater, sacks over our heads, like dipped witches.

(Soap 2)

The unexpected image of ‘dipped witches’ is such a shocking way to conclude this examination of the frustrations felt by so many women. The logical progression of the argument that shows how violence against women always begins with the disrespect of women is startling. In an age of Trump, where blatant sexism is again under the spotlight, such poetry takes on a dreadful urgency. In ‘Egg Tempera’ Guest continues this subtle interrogation of the politics of gender when she concludes:

We girls, we bleeding, breathless girls, taking dumb solace in the fact our bodies have a long history, are politically charged, and would’ve been considered beautiful in the late 1400s.

When it’s over

you roll onto your stomach, inspect yourself with a period eye, and look to the site marked by tepid blots.

(Soap 3)

This narrative is evocative of the long battle lines that have been drawn over the control and representation of women’s bodies, and that bolting post-coitus image which abandons a young woman to ‘inspecting’ herself ‘with a period eye’ and to looking at the ‘site / marked by tepid blots’ has an unforgettable pathos. It subtly, yet powerfully, returns us to Carroll’s directness in confronting the misuses of power that sometimes even occur within our consensual sexual relationships. If Guest is more compliant, than Carroll and Drysdale, in conforming to traditional expectations around what a lyric should look like, she is certainly just as able to unsettle, challenge and disrupt any young man who might want to ‘take a swig from / his Old Fashioned, looking / down his straight nose’ (2). Soap is a stellar debut collection.

In A Song, The World to Come Miranda Lello writes a narrative verse that is often tuned to the comic turn of events. At her Canberra launch Lello read from her collection with the skillful bravado of an experienced performance poet. Her poetry has a fine sense for recounting dramatic moments spent in world travel, cycling around Canberra and in parties. But, as with Carroll and Guest, she is also concerned with examining sexual politics. In one poem, ‘To Mr Charles Bukowski, after Swingers’, Lello writes the following conclusion:

You said women who sleep with too many men have no treasures to give: good fortune for us all there are so many spaces between Madonna and Whore, filled with lovers who have not yet realised the bed is a battleground which measures only losses: all the lovers who never learnt to count.

(A Song 3)

As with Carroll, Drysdale and Guest, the language here is plain and direct but also very successful in juxtaposing sly humour with an uncompromising feminist stand on a woman’s bodily autonomy and right to define how her body is seen. Another joyfully characteristic Lello poem is ‘All the men I have ever loved ride bicycles’. Here Lello comically alludes to an ‘A to Z’ list of past love affairs, not for any salacious melodramatic purpose, but as a simple tribute to one woman’s personal loves. The third stanza reads:

B, with you I would ride slowly along the footpaths of Canberra Or weave drunkenly down Northbourne at three am. I smoked so many cigarettes while thinking of you that When I opened my mouth to speak All that came out were butts and ashes Which you wiped from your lap with a certain tenderness. With our bike gang we would roam the streets – You with your long man legs and me with my smoker’s lungs.

(A Song 5)

I might wish that the language here were a little more layered, for more of Drysdale or Guest’s rich lyrical imagism, but Lello’s ear for the dramatic turn of events which is underscored by a search for intimacy and animated humour is well achieved. And this poem concludes so memorably:

All the men I have ever loved ride bicycles. But in the end, a bicycle humming between your legs Guarantees more happiness than a man.

(A Song 6)

This tongue-in-cheek humour is designed for dramatic effect, to engage with an audience, and is a good example of Lello’s successful utilisation of the techniques of performance poetry.

Of the six poets considered in this review, the two who have the most in common, are Moya Pacey and Maggie Shapley. They write finely crafted free verses, tuned to the conventional disciplines of grammar and stanza, where lineation is defined by the grammatical unit (and, as a consequence, many lines end with punctuation marks). And while they do not write with the drama or animated humour of Lello, nor with the searching social commentary of Carroll, they are very successful in writing personal lyrics that examine and respond to their experiences of relationships, world travel, bereavement, medical conditions and nature.

In, ‘After looking through Carver’s window’, Pacey writes:

Spotted gums prod the sky like diviner’s rods exploring out there. Two crimson rosellas scatter sunflower seed spilling a sapphire throated bowl of sound. When will the rains come? Your face turns away. Things stand as they stood before.

(Black Tulips 30)

This is a marvelous imagist lyric, responding to drought, and attuned to its psychological resonances. There is no ambition to be an eco-poem, with an explicit interrogation of the consequences of climate change for example, but the poem is mindful with its naming of those trees and birds. The poem carefully positions its human observer as part of the natural world, and if the poem is about emotional threat and decline, it is also hopeful of renewal. Shapley echoes these concerns in her poem ‘July’:

Frost sharpens every blade of grass so there’s no mistaking the truth of things. Each serrated edge and feathered vein reveals what is mapped in the master plan. Further off, the early promise of wattle hovers in eucalyptus blue haze, but now a dead rosella, crimson still green, foretells the death of love before it blooms.

(Proof 57)

This poem is so evocative of Canberra winter hardships, yet with that early promise of spring, come too late for a juvenile crimson rosella. Shapley’s attentiveness to the details of the natural world, to the knowledge of colour in adult and juvenile birds, is wonderfully done. Like Pacey's, Shapley's careful approach to describing the natural world, is keenly sensitive to the psychology of the human observer. She continues locating in the natural world the imagery she needs to explore the ending of human relationships in ‘Blackberry’ (9). Here we find a bullied wife who is pruning blackberry at her husband’s insistence, while thinking that with ‘each cut’ there will be fewer ‘birds returning to feast’ and of ‘how what you expect doesn’t always deliver’. She imagines her husband harshly countering this reticence with ‘consequences, you should think of before / not after’. This poems concludes memorably with:

She’d already gathered the fruit and made the jam, lined up jars on the sink like ammunition, labeled with the date that would become the anniversary of leaving him. It was blackberry thorn, that fastened pain, sharp in her finger, as she tensed the wheel and heedless headed out on the highway.

(Proof 9)

The acceptance of pain, but the confident assertion of a woman’s right to autonomy, and the knowledge that she is happier alone than in a second rate relationship, is strongly evoked. There is so much resolve in that ‘heedless’ response to a prick that ‘fastened pain / sharp’. This poem has us cheering for the female protagonist, expectant of bright change.

Pacey also celebrates this female agency in her poem ‘Knitting for insomniacs’. Here Pacey uses pun and a subtle humour to celebrate the work of women, all the time contrasting this creativity, with a male propensity for war:

On nights when sleep eludes women across the world pick up needles – gather dropped stiches of spite and old hatreds – untangle the skeins of war. They knit soft bombs. Cover a tank with pink wool, hang a strawberry tassel from its turret. Swathe a submarine yellow with acrylic and cotton warm as a baby’s bootee. Fat pom-poms conceal

the dark hull.

(Black Tulips 24)

‘Blackberry’ and ‘Knitting for insomniacs’ are characteristic of the confidence and skill with which Shapley and Pacey approach their poetry. Within conventional forms, and a straightforward approach to language, they are able to balance great emotional weight and a keenly observed love for the natural world. Their poetry may not disrupt or challenge the abuses of power in the shocking way of Carroll; but as celebration of suburban, educated, independent lives, Pacey and Shapley create technically adroit, memorable and sophisticated poetry.

I would like to join these six poets in expressing my gratitude to Shane Strange and Recent Work Press for producing such beautiful books brimful of engaging, diverse and valuable work. This is a democratic press spotlighting excellence.

In this unusual debut collection, Shevaun Cooley writes in both English and Animal. She is a curious watcher of the non-human world throughout the book, observing scavenging kangaroos, trying to save stranded false killer whales, listening to a horse as it ‘drags up thunder from the ground’, coming face to face in Wales with y llwynog (the fox), and flying with the kittiwakes ‘who call out their own names’. You could even say that she goes out of her way to make special contact, employing her skills as a mountain climber and occasional sailor to get as near as she can to non-human nature. Yet all the while, she keeps a close eye on herself, constantly wondering what her discoveries concerning these other creatures might tell her about herself.

She presents, indirectly, her notion of what a successful poem might look like in a piece inspired by Lucian Freud’s painting ‘Naked Man with Rat’. The tone is hushed: ‘You don’t move, but sense its trace, / so light and exquisite, at rest on your upper thigh.’ Cooley’s voice is a quiet one most of the time, but what she lacks in loudness she gains in subtlety. Many of her poems drift from one elusive association to the next, supplemented by soundplay, wordplay, etymology, scientific vocabulary, word-class shifts and, occasionally translation. She is also a refreshingly literary writer. She draws on the work of Welsh priest and poet R. S. Thomas, using lines from his verse as titles for every single poem in Homing. She also refers to Raymond Carver, Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Franz Kafka and Rilke, as well as the reclusive nature writers John Alec Baker and Annie Dillard. But for all her exquisiteness, she never forgets nature’s rapacious, menacing side — in fact, she feels drawn to it.

The opening section, with the daunting but geographically precise title of ‘34º24’13.6”S 115º11’43.9”E’, features poems with a mostly Australian setting. In ‘call your horizons in’, Cooley not only thinks with animals but with the sky and the sea and the sand:

Hard as an icon, the sky, and almost as untouchable. In Flinders Bay, the sea is only partway through its sweeping. A perigean tide as high as you’ve ever seen begins now to ebb, an unseasonal creep that draws away the white sand, leaves the dark mineral glitter of ilmenite. They say the grains are faintly magnetic. Is that why you put your hands to it? Get off your knees. They say the water is never warm like this unless a current runs from the north, dragging the sea- bed, unsettling whatever is used to sinking in. That must be why you’re in it to your ankles. When the white- headed petrel lifts itself from the shore you can watch it all you like, but it brings nothing closer. If you could ride with it, would you gather in the end- lessness, or wheel your hunting down to the silver flash of a fin? You’ve quickened now to the blunt horizon. The seaweed has a hayricked, iodine stink. Dead inkfish line the shore, their Rorschach bodies a clue to what stops the pulse. I said get off your knees. Let’s see what the petrel draws in with its cry.

(13-14)

Instantly, we are plunged into the action by an incomplete sentence comparing the ‘hardness’ of the sky to an icon. This may strike you as unconvincing — as icons are generally painted on wood, the firmness implied here is really only that of timber. But this mild incongruity is typical of Cooley’s style and is meant to alert us to that fact that her topic is not primarily physical rigidity but spiritual difficulty. The enigmatic title therefore also contains an undertone of ‘orison’ or prayer.

The poem then moves us from heaven to Earth. Cooley loves the daunting technical term, and she throws in two here, perigean (from the noun ‘perigee’, meaning ‘that point in a planet’s [esp. moon’s] orbit at which it is nearest to earth’) and ilmenite (‘a mixed oxide mineral containing iron and titanium’). She uses the first, strikingly, to suggest that a parallel ‘unseasonal creep’ is moving through her own troubled psyche, and with the second, she can concretize this disturbance as a type of paradoxical dark matter that both glitters and exerts an irresistible attraction, like magnetism. At this point, she sinks to her knees instinctively, as the only way she can think of to deal with her predicament. At the same time, she is chided by the voice of normality, a second, less sensitive self, that insists on her getting up.

The poem then reverses from Earth back to sky with the appearance of the white-headed petrel. Cooley pays homage to Charles Baudelaire’s albatross — vastes oiseaux des mers — elsewhere, and demonstrates her affiliation with all sky-roving poet-seabirds in a number of poems. The petrel can bring no discrete object to the speaker; in its flight, however, it can evoke a sense of spacious emptiness or numinous no-thing-ness that, like the dark mineral glitter of the ilmenite, somehow lightens the experience of abject hardship. This illuminating turn is consolidated by a question (‘would you gather the endlessness, or wheel your hunting down to the silver / flash of a fin?’) to boost the momentum of the poem and to quicken it mercury-like against the ‘bluntness’ of the speaker’s private ordeal.

I think it would be fair to say that, at the heart of Homing, there lies a degree of tension between constructive and organic approaches to poetry. In a brief note, Cooley mentions that she found herself ‘writing poems in parts’ — particularly in cases where the poems relied ‘on creatures to carry them’. In ‘call your horizons in’, Cooley sets out to build a text through a marshalling of distinct details such as the icon-like sky, the learned reference to the perigean tide, the nagging voice that repeats ‘Get off your knees’ and so on. In this instance, the sea-setting of the poem effectively ‘naturalizes’ the separate elements, and renders the more intrusive poetic devices (such as the frequent use of the formula They say to insert explanatory material) less conspicuous. In other poems, however, the constructive dynamic is much more dominant, and results in texts that are built up bit by bit collage-fashion rather than organically in flows. The three poems of the middle section are all like this. Here are the opening lines from the first one, called ‘the true trade: to go with the grain’:

Cross the high meseta of central Spain in summer, and

you will see nothing

on either side but fields of wheat, the air’s dry grain. Under open skies in France, there was a time to declare the wolf is passing through, at waves of wind flattening the grain: they knew what it means to be unsettled. “Paul Celan chews a word

like a stone,”

said Jean Daive. “All day long. It produces word-energy.”

He could see it pulse

in the muscles of Celan’s jaw. With enough pressure

even sand will turn to glass.

But even this begins with the simple matter of a few grains pressed hard against each other. I wonder whether Sisyphus began to push only a kernel of earth that grew as he rolled it uphill.

(45)

Content is generated through the clever unfolding of the various senses of the key-word ‘grain’ along with a fertile association of ideas. First, ‘grain’ is used in its cereal sense and is linked to Spanish wheat-fields, before hinting at the sense of texture in the menacing image of the ‘waves of wind flattening the grain’. Perhaps the association at this point between cereal and food helps provide a link to Celan and the anecdote about the poet chewing on words. Thereafter we come to the idea of pressure and glass, at which point ‘grain’ is used in its particle sense. From sand-particles Cooley makes the etymological jump to ‘kernel’, and from there we find ourselves contemplating Sisyphus and his terrible punishment. The ingenuity at work here is quite astonishing, but for me the whirl of polysemy and association is too contrived.

This is borne out in another poem in parts called ‘the line trembles; mostly, when we would reel in the catch, there is nothing to see’. It opens with a story about Sigmund Freud, who apparently once dissected four hundred eels in an effort to locate the gonads of the male of the species. The poem then touches on a personal anecdote involving Freudian slips of the tongue, the folk-belief that eels were born when a loose strand of hair from a horse’s tail fell into water, a part of the poem ‘L’anguilla’ by Eugenio Montale translated from the Italian, and instructions about how to skin one of the poor creatures. Here Cooley puts into practice the belief that her wild things have to be approached ‘from the side’ rather than directly. However, I would gladly do without all this dexterous jigsaw-puzzling for the following lines in which Cooley makes a more memorable and altogether more fluent kind of contact with her theme:

This is how the eel is made. We take a ribbon of albumen, and infuse it with clear Sargasso blood. Translucent, at first, then marred to a darker skin, it drifts until it makes river- fall, where we change the eyes to gold and leave it to feed and fatten on bugs and crayfish and old flesh rotting the riverbed. Here it learns it is lonely. Also how to slip the hook, and tooth quietly at the mud.

(64-65)

This lyrical burst is, paradoxically, much more conservative in its use of poetic devices: for the most part, it relies on lucid, vibrant phrasing and flowing, eel-like rhythms, supplemented by a sure use of line-breaks, a touch of soundplay (‘marred/darker’) and some low-key alliteration. But, compared to the rest of the poem, which seems like a set of sober preparatory studies, there is a much stronger sense of the wild here, both in the language and its subject.

Many of the poems in the third and final section, ‘52º45’34.4”N 4º47’11.6”W’, are set in the Welsh countryside. Cooley is a lover of place-names, and relishes eye-catching examples such as Cnicht, Crib Goch, the Llynau Cŵm, Coed y Bleiddiau, Ynys Enlli, Dolgellau and Penrhyndeudrath, all of which excite on the page with their typographical word-energy. Wales is also a place that brings the writer closer to the untamed. The poem ‘in the hushed meadows the weasel’ is, for this collection, a surprisingly concentrated quasi-sonnet-like text dealing with one such encounter:

Turned away from the sea, tired of the shifting blues. I’d like to know what else there is. Please. The days stretch out but the light seems to be closing off, a hand on the shutter. At midday in the field, I saw the weasel. The air suppled by her eager spine, and in her paws rose the dusky scent of damp earth and dung, of blood, a seed long embedded. She was nothing at all; less than a reddish passing, some deadly surprise that sinuates sometimes through each of us. I think now I have waited my whole life to pass through a field of white flowers and long grass — like that, light as a murderer. To be the small fire that bursts the earth into being beneath, then dies.

(57)

After the halting opening, which skilfully re-enacts the stultifying sadness of the speaker, suppleness returns to the diction with the appearance of the weasel and all that it stands for: life at its most essential, with more than a hint of precariousness and ‘deadly surprise’. Adjectives are relished (‘eager’, ‘dusky’), verbs grow distinctive — although ‘sinuates’ is a bit too poetical for my taste — and there is even some uncharacteristic end-rhyme. Cooley’s ‘field of white flowers and long grass’ is an emblem of all that life could mean, and the weasel that she evokes for us represents an intensity of being that we no longer find it easy to feel in ourselves. In other words, we can be brought back to life in these meetings.

All in all, her cast of elegant predators — petrels, whales, foxes, otters, egrets and ospreys — reminds her that life at its richest is always at the edge of things, and therefore fundamentally a kind of life-and-death at once, as inextricably connected as two swans she describes as ‘untouching and inseparate’ (76). Human beings, on the other hand, tend to cling with a kind of deadly greed to existence and are apt to kill in the most lifeless, degrading ways, exemplified by the description of eel-skinning already mentioned. Awareness of this tendency leads Cooley to a certain justifiable uneasiness with regard to the human. Like J. A. Baker — whom she quotes as saying ‘let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence’ (58) — she feels a palpable disgust at ‘our lasting stench’ (71). In a sense, Cooley’s concern with nature’s rapacious aspect seems at least partly motivated by her fear that what we think of as ‘normal’ human existence is tantamount to sanitised living death. Poetry as resurrection? It’s a tall order, but surely one worth attempting.

Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt is Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s generous but intentionally not exhaustive examination of several key poets and writers writing between the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the Western Australian wheatbelt region. In this sizeable text, the literary engagements of Albert Facey, Cyril Goode, James Pollard, John Ewers, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Barbara York Main, Elizabeth Jolley, Tom Flood and John Kinsella with this confronting environmental space and history are examined. Hughes-d’Aeth sensitively explores the legacy of the region and highlights on-going areas of concern.

Central to the text is the sense of the wheatbelt as a unique space within Australia’s literary and social history. Demarcation of the wheatbelt is a striking geographic phenomenon; the contrast between golden pasture and green bush is a sharp outline, setting out where human agricultural endeavours become reined in by the minimum rainfall threshold, followed by the rabbit-proof fence. The result is a sharp “clearing line”, established by both nature and humans alike. Hughes-d’Aeth illuminates the history of creative writing produced in and about this place: “the event is the creation of the wheatbelt and the witnesses are the creative writers” (3). The wheatbelt is transformed; Aboriginal people are excluded and the land is “denuded of its native vegetation”, in early novels by Tom Flood (1989) and John Ewers (1946), while their white Australian protagonists reflect on the sublime, intimidating vastness of the space. Hughes-d’Aeth begins by tracing the colonial creation of the wheatbelt, briefly outlining its devastating impacts on the Noongar people, before moving on to a more detailed examination of the economics and logistics of establishment, as well as environmentalist poetics.

There is a questioning undercurrent to Like Nothing on this Earth: “How, for instance, is an economic scheme for financial gain through the sale of cash crops also meant (and indeed felt) to be a return to nature? What exactly is natural about farming, and how can it be reconciled with its eradication of wilderness in southwestern Australia? Ideology answers these questions where it can, and where it cannot, it offers up methods by which they can be forestalled, evaded, repressed or transmuted into questions which can be more satisfactorily answered”(23). In the 1880s onwards, poetry and prose begin to reflect on wheat as a call to arms – as in Banjo Paterson – or as a more “natural” labour in comparison to city work, as in C. J. Dennis’ works (28). Hughes-d’Aeth pursues an “ideology of the wheat” to link this period with later works. The early writers covered in this introductory chapter connect the nascent wheatbelt with toil, suffering, and a dogged sense of determination to persevere. However, this is at the expense of both the Indigenous people and the environment itself. Later writers, such as John Kinsella, are still grappling with the legacy of these impacts. In the chapter on Kinsella, Hughes-d’Aeth engages with the environmentalist legacy of the wheatbelt, but observes that “one of the virtues of his [Kinsella’s] practice is that he has no time for the cult of purity that can afflict and pervert both modern environmentalism and contemporary eco-poetry” (539). There is a space for “feral restoration”, that is respectful and resilient.  Arguably, this is the most productive space possible for the wheatbelt’s on-going literary legacy: one of respectful acknowledgement of what is and has been, coupled with decisive action to do better by the land, its people, and the native populations of animals birds and plants.

Much of Like Nothing on this Earth is grounded in Hughes-d’Aeth’s delicate retellings of wheatbelt writers’ life stories, and how these have come to be reflected in their works. In one chapter, Hughes-d’Aeth analyses Albert Facey’s biographical tale of deprivation, and his time as a virtual child slave on an early wheatbelt property outlines the hardships of the period and space. Hughes-d’Aeth comments that “the strange mixture of isolation and common purpose that fused settlers together in their disparate existence was never clearer than in accounts of burning” (53), referring to the process of extermination burns to clear and permanently kill native vegetation, rather than carefully controlled Indigenous methods. Facey’s depictions of settler participation in these decisive burns are a formative act on the environment, destroying native species in order to more readily impose crop production on the land. Hughes-d’Aeth notes that the process was almost sacramental, cyclic. In the chapter on Cyril E. Goode’s poetry, this tendency is highlighted again: “In Goode’s poetry, particularly his later lamentations, clearing – as actual work – is often derided and treated as a kind of purgatory to which he had been unfairly condemned” (106). There is a sense of divorce from the environmental impacts of the act of clearing, but also a further linkage of the  dehumanising, oppressive nature of many of the tasks undertaken by settlers, both unwittingly and indifferently, and even on their own personal level.

The chapter on Jack Davis is exceptionally detailed and insightful, examining an Indigenous response to the acts and ideologies within the wheatbelt. Like Nothing on this Earth provides a historical overview of systemic oppression of Indigenous people within the wheatbelt, including an assessment of the uncertain and easily resumed parcelling out of land by the Mission to Aboriginal people, effectively excluding these people from the central business model of the wheatbelt applied by both Facey and Cyril, namely borrowing against the value of the land (328). Hughes-d’Aeth notes that Davis “was unusual in that he was genuinely bicultural in this highly segregated world. Educated and literature, and the son of a citizen, he did not suffer from an innate sense of difference from the white owners of stations” who systemically discriminated against him (342). Davis’ writing was initially a means of staving off boredom from camp life and while working on stations. Hughes-d’Aeth reflects that “Davis was the first to express a distinctly Aboriginal sense of the interface between country and city that characterises the Western Australian wheatbelt. It was not just a distinction between production and consumption, or nature and civility, or the rural and the urban – but a fundamental difference in the kind of history one, as an Aboriginal person, could inhabit” (352). The aim of Like Nothing on this Earth is not to offer terms for reconciliation, but rather to better preserve and illuminate the historical roots of on-going issues within the region, and perhaps nationally. There is certainly room for more detailed Indigenous engagements with the space of this discourse.

In his own words, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has produced “an amalgam of literary history, literary sociology and literary geography” (554). Like Nothing on this Earth situates both the facts and fictions of the Western Australian wheatbelt within the bodies of writers, poets and their texts, as well as the physical environmental tolls on the land and its people. Importantly, Like Nothing on this Earth is not intended as an exhaustive encyclopaedia; it is a text inherently designed to evolve, making space for new facets and forms. Hughes-d’Aeth does not criticise the wheatbelt’s on-going position as an invaluable farming resource that continues to be exploited, but pushes for a more nuanced understanding of its value. The wheatbelt functions as a sublime space and state, inspiring both awe and horror, as well as serving as a living emblem of on-going tensions between Australia, its people, and its environment.

What is it to be tree, wood, coppice, root tangle, to be inflected, to arch? My feeling as I have been reading Give Forest Its Next Portent is that Peter Larkin is creating language, and densities of word and form, solidities and spaces, to open up potential responses to such a question. What might this portend for a forest, and for the poet and reader who contemplates the kinds of things trees and their communicative amassing in forests enact? What can the poet, or the reader under the imperative 'Give', give to the future of the forest?

Larkin’s book has been for me a slow read because each of its parts becomes an invitation to contemplation of resonances of living wood; even when it is separated from its living plant, it creates in situ a habitus for other life. Give Forest is in seven parts, each a long poem of several sections: ‘Brushwood By Inflection’; ‘exposure (A Tree) presents’; ‘Sparse Reach Stretches the Field’; ‘Arch the Apartness / \ Proffering Trees’; ‘Hollow Allow Woods’; ‘Trees Not Tending Leaves’; ‘praying // firs \\ attenuate’. Each section begins with several short epigraphs, including from Theodor Adorno, the Gospel of Luke and theologian John Milbank. Several sections include an opening note, to explain terms or images, such as ‘inflection’: ‘The “inflection point” on a branch is where the direction of curve outwards changes to the direction of curve upwards, and is usually a play-off between elastic bending and thickening growth’ (9). These notes sometimes tend toward prose poems in themselves.

The style of the poetry varies from lines of fully justified text (prose poem-like) interspersed with short-lined free verse stanzas,  to series of couplets and prose poems of several pages. What stands out is the vocabulary, the play of nouns and verbs and their evocation of place and other-than-human being. There is a contemplative, detailed and somewhat uncanny gaze at work here that translates in the poems into an aural scape that, in its excess of signification, unsettles human self-presumption. Or so it was for this reader.

In the first long poem, ‘Brushwood By Inflection’, inflection is a place of bend, time and gift. The tree of its first section scatters, gives. There is a dense, on-moving evocation of the chaotic, given underlay of brushwood fallen from trees. The use of language draws the reader into this piling up and spilling out of the cast off wood. Section two introduces mechanistic things cutting open and wounding. In section three, a long prose poem, a ‘we’ enters along with sacral allusion. There is a sense of différance in the tree, and the 'tree is subject to not belonging to the network it projects but is brushed from flesh to flesh at the woundlessness of inflection itself’ (30). Section four, opening out to couplets and the visual space these provide, speaks of ‘decisions of a tree’ (32) and concludes ‘brush the event from its tree’ (34). The ambiguity of ‘brush’ – as a verb, to efface or clear perhaps, but as a noun the tree’s gift – is characteristic of Larkin’s style in this collection and effective as a way of unsettling expectations and challenging the reader to think further and become other. These are not cheap puns.

‘exposure (A Tree) presents’, the second poem, gives the reader root as lens (39) and evokes the rates of the processes of tree-ing (40). Can a reader bend into becoming tree?

a stance raking forward what diminishment thins in shared vertical attire … …

intimate gash intricate

mesh, open chute

its root, focal

blockade at branch

(41)

There are echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ in the poet’s delight in excesses of language, and perhaps also something of James Joyce: ‘Seatage of root makes suit to sweep the leap’ (41).

A human gaze is confounded, multiplied, in Jean-Luc Marion’s parlance, ‘saturated’. Plants are languaged in these poems but not speaking; this is a kind of English of the 'being given' of a thing being opened:

being riven as crack

taken at

fixity of the given

until it awns open-

toll from the stutter

upon vertical abutment

(44)

This is poetry as philosophical (and theological) companion and critique.

The agency and rationalities of trees, as part of the complex inter-agencies and reason of woods, can be read here, ‘where the tree itself pauses’ (45) and roots have logic (46). Again a kind of tree-y différance is suggested (51), and the proposition of an arboreal sublime: ‘the tree’s brusqued heel of transcendence’ (51-52). As reader, I am pressed to consider what an arboreal economics might look like (54-57). The sequence closes ‘before / an horizon immense at its other than replete’ (57).

With the language and imagery of gift and givenness, healing and growth, ‘exposure (A Tree) presents’ also speaks of privation and scarcity. This idea becomes central to ‘Sparse Reach Stretches the Field’, and the reader understands the ‘scar’ in ‘scarcity’, the ‘degradation of forest’ (62). There are echoes of the insight of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, when Larkin writes for example:

we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity   remit as the city expands faster than its own needlessness of site   at frail stretch at last for patience with poorly endowed patina on any convertible placing   from cone of branch to the field-spasm of horizontal woodland subsumed from outlier   a debris of fore-brandished choked relay

(61)

How is the writer reponsible in relation to ‘trees pencil phobes by / natural graphic scratch’ (65) or ‘the field starved enough to publish’ (66) when ‘every cast bud [is] taking its spare tree chance’ (73)? The final section of ‘Sparse Reach Stretches the Field’ brilliantly conjures not only the agency of trees but more deeply the possibility of trees' assent (or yes), where scarcity calls forth, for good or ill, a kind of ‘making-do’ (74-80).

The deconstructive (in a Derridean sense) of the arboreal recurs in ‘Arch the Apartness / \ Proffering Trees’:

exilic road projects

like particles its underease

or between-arch to sense a

beginner greenish hue of

elementary non-exile

(89)

Deconstruction, though, might mean not only the way language works to undo itself, but also the way humans work to undo worlds, often the worlds of other creatures. The poem concludes with an image of interstices:

of arch compelling itself

in ease of apartness

stood to betweens

(102)

The fifth poem, ‘Hollow Allow Woods’, explains the author’s note, responds to the ‘shallow quarry which forms an under-bowl to woodland … of the flat hollow(s) of Mear’s Plantation’ and a nearby barn and cottages, all ‘half a mile south of Hillesley in Gloucestershire’ (104). The ‘predominant flora [of this quarry] is ash, sweet chestnut, and … beech with an understorey of old man’s beard, hart’s tongue and shadow-stinted bramble’ (104). Absence recurs as a theme here:

extraction wasn’t wide enough

for infinity but steeped bluntly

local down a flank

of absence

(107)

no mouth for trees

a hollow is deserted

transience crossing (too

thickly creasing)

absence

(120)

The hollow is hollow and not. There remains an impulse toward co-agential growth coterminous with a counter-impulse: ‘If a crater were outlived forever it would still borrow this blister scope of tree against faults of sky out hunting for it …’ (138).

As its title suggests, the penultimate poem, ‘Trees Not Tending Leaves’, shifts the focus to leaves:

…           leaves breathe-in unchested    not fringed but ranged in coils    counter-tuned to be sheer leaf at handling    a tablet of micro-weather

(141)

Where many trees are deciduous:

loss of leaf is not lack of leaf but the main shower of implication    a spate of retention grounded in jettison

(157)

The final poem, ‘praying // firs \\ attenuate’, turns us to the possibility of trees at prayer

praying firs to the

attenuate ample

of their office

(167)

and arboreal invocation, yet also of what human prayer might be with trees, and prayer as (not like a) tree.

how to plant prayer on its raked scope, offer a leap from rampant sediment, what will become a neck of fir

(163)

where ‘Prayer takes the flightpath of a world not yet cleared of trees’ and where the reader is instructed

do not pray

in the guise of another

instilment   let the

firs be their own

surplus of salience

(177)

The poems in Give Forest Its Next Portent speak both tenderness and a robust (almost austere) passion for the more-than-human forest. On the occasions where ‘we’ enters the poems it is ambiguous. Is the tree or the human voice of the poet speaking? What does the 'we' suggest: ‘contrition’ or its lack (79) or human presence mimicking trees (99), perhaps an irrecoverable distance embedded in the gaze-word of approach to the other? This is a book of dense language which presses the reader to attend to the arboreal other. To write about such a complex and innovative work is inevitably to get it wrong, to read into what the poems convey. The style of Larkin’s writing is saturated, conveying an excess of meaning, calling forth what Marion describes as a counter-experience, in this case a counter-experience mediated through Larkin’s contemplative engagement with trees as they exercise agency in a world where human agents so often appear to dominate, a world where trees however stretched and stressed are central players. I found the final stanzas of ‘praying // firs \\ attenuate’ deeply moving. Tolle lege.

These two books of 'Ecopoems' attempt to find a way through perhaps the most pernicious and intractable problem of climate change: reorienting perceptions and values so that we stop seeing it as something happening 'out there' that someone should do something about, and start seeing it as something happening to us just as much as it is happening to the polar bears on melting Arctic ice floes. In pursuit of this, Starbuck uses ambiguity, metaphor, cadence and rhythm to arrest the reader’s attention and make them reassess not just the obvious, primary causes of climate change and environmental degradation, but the whole ideological superstructure that supports it, distracts us, and continually diverts and dilutes action.

This is clearly a huge task, but luckily Starbuck’s dexterity in poetic technique is equal to it, rarely assaulting the reader with obvious polemic, but willing to do the groundwork and make properly frugal use of words planted like seeds that germinate and grow, blooming into a full range of meaning and possibility.  'How would stars look if you never saw TV?' asks 'Ancient Dwellings Near Paisley, Oregon', playing on the double meaning of 'stars' as evanescent celebrities on TV and the eternal stars of the night sky (Hawk 35). 'If meaning were people you dug roots with', he asks, 'would you care enough / to venture beyond Facebook' (Hawk 35). Similarly, the title poem of Hawk on Wire asks the reader to think about where wild animals can flee to when even the poles have melted, as it recounts a hawk that

avoids me flying ahead from pole to pole until there are no more poles like wild things fleeing acidic seas ...

(Hawk 14)

This melancholy and chilling use of ambiguity is pushed even further in 'Water Cave Near Mogollon Rim' where Starbuck is 'meditating on the words placenta and phoenix' in the womb-like cave before returning 'back into the world of those who have forgotten / where they came from, where they are now / and, like all animals, where flesh is soon going.' (Hawk 32). Starbuck’s frugality with words forces us to question his meaning here. Does this final thought refer simply to the truism that every mortal thing must die? Or does it remind us that due to climate change everything mortal may soon die? Of course, we are meant to conclude that it is both. Starbuck (2014) has written elsewhere ('Manifesto from a Poet on a Dying Planet') that the task of the poet today is to make people 'recognize physical reality around them, and conscience and/or spirit-reality inside them'. We must consider that we will one day die, consider the futility of material wealth and like the poet meditate on the necessity of attending to the 'spirit-reality' inside.

Starbuck even asks us to question such fundamental constructs of the modern world as the idea of discrete and fixed time itself.  Time is not fixed in these poems but malleable and contingent:

Here a second can seem so long Like when reaching for a fish without a net. Other times, ten years goes by In the blink of a love-struck eye. I read that Inuit maps are based on 'sleeps' And difficulty of travel. Before leaving, you must understand The machine understands none of this.

(Ind. Oz. 45)

References to exact times and locales are therefore spliced with references to geologic periods and mass extinctions (as in 'The Meteor'). Futurity is fragmented by references to the ancient world and the difficulty of changing human nature itself. When astronauts observe warfare on Earth from their hermetically sealed environment in 'View of Modern War from the Space Station' one of them is reading The Iliad, reminding us that the real problem is within us and cannot be escaped.

In the haunting poem 'Coyote’s Prediction' the theme of time is not foregrounded or explicit, but is still fundamental. A scene of decay is also one of healing, as industrial society’s marks on the landscape are effaced and overwritten by nature. The poem could be about the process of reclamation of an old logging mill on the river now, or, equally, it could be about the world after modern civilisation has destroyed itself and nature is – finally –  left to slowly heal and replace:

There is a ghost The water healing River paddle wounds, Old logging mill Lanced by seeds Of forgotten giants, ... Only things that belong here will last.

(Ind. Oz. 85)

The alliteration here –  water and wounds, logging and lanced –  emphasises the theme of nature’s vegetable power, too slow for human eyes to notice, but utterly inexorable. Nature in this poem is not reduced to 'mother earth', passively forgiving and accepting, but is more the nature of indigenous legends. It has real agency and is able to both heal and lance as it sees fit, recalling G K Chesterton’s remark about old forests being places of enchantment where 'things [were] double or different from themselves' (2000, 321). By changing focus from the merely human time-span and therefore our perceptions of permanence and transition, Starbuck de-centres humanity.

The connections between modern conceptions of time and the fantasy world of neoliberal financial speculation are neatly brought together in 'After 2008' which considers the necessary role social conditioning and symbolism play in the modern economy. 'Did you ever stop to think / some crosswalk buttons you push each day / are connected to nothing?' the poem asks. Of course, there is little if any difference in the timing, whether we push the button or not:

This makes you question if they were designed by social engineers instead of electrical engineers, and similarly, if we are all being played so that some day 40 years of your hard labor in saving and pension will disappear from banks the instant symbol makers decide.

(Ind. Oz. 52)

By such means Starbuck compels the reader to think about not just climate change itself, but also how deeply ideology and symbolism are embedded in the functioning of Western society and how unthinking acceptance of them has led to a world where money is digital. The digits on a screen are now no longer connected to any real or physical thing, but they are enough to make us acquiesce and take part in the continued rape of the planet. Such is the power of symbolism and conditioning in the industrial Oz we now inhabit and which Starbuck attempts to cut through in these poems.

Thus, whilst poems such as 'San Diego Swap Meet', 'Patient Y' and 'If Washington Were Pompeii' might seem to be about the 2008 financial crash and its devastating aftermath, they are still very much 'ecopoems' in that they are making the necessary connections between the world we participate in every day as we go to work, watch TV, listen to politicians talk about the stock market, and the seeming impossibility of actually achieving a real reduction in carbon emissions. Which, the poems ask, is really the less real: financial debt or ecological debt? Why? Because so much of what we see of the world comes via media such as television or social media and the Internet, our 'reality' is increasingly mediated and manipulated through 'symbolism that represents / interests of the symbol-makers' ('Moon and Money Poem', Ind. Oz. 46). Whilst we believe that we are better informed about the world than ever before, these poems question and unsettle that belief, pointing out the disconnection between the superficial world media reflects and serves, and the physical and spiritual realities, without and within, that we have become blind to.

Starbuck expends so much thought and energy explicating this (dis)connection because, as the anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan has argued, ultimately it is symbolism that allows us to rationalise our putative separation from nature:

Amid the standardizing, disciplinary effects of today’s systems of technology and capital, we are subjected to an unprecedented barrage of images and other representations. Symbols have largely crowded out everything real and direct, both in the daily round of interpersonal interactions and in the accelerating extinction of nature. This state of affairs is generally accepted as inevitable, especially since received wisdom dictates that symbol-making is the cardinal, defining quality of a human being. We learn as children that all behavior, and culture itself, depend on symbol manipulation; this characteristic is what separates us from mere animals. (2002, 199-200)

This disconnect forms much of the subject matter for the later volume, Hawk on Wire, with Starbuck exploring the role that the glossy, affectless surface-world of television, social media and computers play in seeming to connect us whilst keeping us ultimately disconnected. Starbuck cleverly weaves this motif of surface-world into his poems, with the constant, troubling thought that that surface may be broken and the past return to bite us. Hence 'Geo-Poem' observes that '66 million years ago in the Cenozoic era / seawater filled these valleys / with bass hovering like piñatas unaware' (Hawk 16). These primitive bass 'knew only the language / of hunger, sex, territory, blankly staring / like men today watching TV” (Hawk 16). As with so many of these poems, Starbuck achieves his effect by what he leaves unsaid, asking the reader to make the connections for themselves. Seawaters may well fill these valleys again after 66 million years whilst most of us are as unaware and unconcerned as the bass were.

Starbuck’s careful but effective use of poetic techniques is neatly displayed in 'Canyon', the final poem in Hawk on Wire. The poem begins with intricate near-rhymes ('I wanted to fish but there were cliffs, / thorns, wasps, underwater drops') before switching to tightly-wound descending cadence ('I can say more / but to know / you must go') that echo the treacherous and precipitous decline that must be negotiated before 'melting glaciers / change experiences like these / maybe forever' (Hawk 76). Starbuck leaves the ambiguity open, inviting us to ponder how much this difficult descent is literal, referring to the necessity of communing with hard-to-reach wild places, and how much metaphorical, referring to the coming descent into apocalypse that must be negotiated as best we can.

Starbuck has said that his poems swim in two different 'rivers', one of which is environmental poetry and the other 'Pacific Northwest nature poems' (Wilkins 2016). Whilst Starbuck’s Pacific Northwest nature poems are accomplished and thoughtful, it is the environmental poems that really show his capability as a poet, drawing connections for the reader, challenging, and meditating not just on the effects of climate change or its proximate causes but the deep structure of the ideologies that promote passivity in the face of apocalypse.

In the first poem of this collection, Emery introduces himself and points to the bush track that he intends to take us down. Along the way, at strolling pace, we become aware, and comprehend the effect on him, of all the natural and constructed features of his coastal town and, through the poetic conversation that ensues, are allowed to understand his 'Wonderland' (55) – the world of his imagination and his reasoning.

Much has been written about the psychological benefits of walking, and the creative thinking that can result, and Emery’s collection of rhythmic poems seems to be a prime exhibit. In the poem 'And the word "environment"’, he writes:

how lucky I am to be walking under these trees, through this scrub just metres from the cliff and the blue unknowns of the sea, ...

(1)

The American Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, David Macauley (1993) states: 'Philosophy ... begins not simply with wondering but also – quite literally – in wandering. Walking facilitates meditation, in part, because it provides mediation between us and the earth; it initiates conversation between the foot and the ground; it introduces our bodies to and into the world, the surrounding medium. Ideas and images begin to flow … .' To support his claim, Macauley says the American poet of deep ecology, Gary Snyder, believed: 'walking embodies the perfect balance of spirit and humility … presumably in that it brings us back down from the transcendental heights while at the same time freeing our mind to move, breathe and imagine in natural ways'. Another American poet, Edward Hirsch, has written how he uses walking as a 'prelude to inspiration'.

Emery is obviously aware of, and thankful for, the rich rewards of mindful walking. In the first poem he reminds us that:

... Ted Kooser composed

one hundred poems called Winter Morning Walks as he recovered from cancer ...

(1)

Emery’s interaction with the natural world seems to have brought him a great degree of self-understanding: an ability to be at ease with himself despite ambiguity and paradox. He writes:

from the ugliness that abounds,

beauty which looks back at us, tells us who we are, the fitness of this goes with that which might explain the world but can’t;

(61)

Although he writes 'All poetry's didactic, at least to some extent' (56) he ends almost every poem with an ellipsis, indicating that nothing is definitive or finished.

Emery’s collection is a series of honest, entertaining and enlightened monologues. The humble, conversational tone hides Emery’s gift for inventive language which freshens his coastal and suburban surrounds. He writes of 'the baffle of trees' (5) and 'A street sweeper’s orbital brushes pointlessly polishing tar' (28).

His long sentences can accommodate many views, often paradoxical, and he is not afraid of using multisyllabic words to elucidate his thoughts. For example, in 'You want ghosts' he writes:

alterations of the tide. There is patience in this predictability and unpredictability, a waiting and a willingness to speculate.

(57)

Even if he is not taking us on a walk, his poems invoke movement. In 'For the world' he is on a train which 'travels by the tradesman’s entrance' (22). Even when he writes of sitting in one spot, you can feel the blood pumping and the thoughts coming and going, which 'refuse to settle'. (27)

Many of the poems are about the act of thinking and, when put poetically in writing, the act of composing poetry. For example, one poem opens, 'I chase a thought along an early evening street' and finishes:

... Thought winks, leans back against a seat,

and I stand puffing on the platform as the 3.52 pulls out ...

(11)

The poems, 'The right time to write' (32) and 'If you write deplorable twaddle' (54) are similarly Artes Poeticae.

The body’s role in the thinking process is also dwelt upon. Emery writes of 'my body talking to me' (9) and in the poem, 'We are lashed to our body', describes thought as:

 ... salt tight across your shoulder blades

or its faint reminder on your lips and tongue

(7)

Emery is always present in these poems and some are autobiographical. The poet confesses he is:

A baby-boomer who dodged the war in Vietnam, who didn’t have the gumption to conscientiously object, ...

(44)

We learn that he is 'Sixty-four/ [is] an auspicious age' (10). We find out what great novels he has lived his life through (30) and which baby-boomer youth culture he has survived 'more-or-less intact …' (53).

The title of each poem (except the last) is a quotation from a novelist, poet, scientist, philosopher or composer – some familiar, while others invite further investigation. The title of the collection, Have Been and Are is a phrase from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and a sub-heading to the penultimate poem, 'Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful': 'have been and are being evolved'. The quotation titles are illuminating in themselves and Emery has used them as inspiration for the poems. It is a courageous gambit which pays off as the poems are, on the whole, as interesting as the quotations.

The regular way in which each poem is set on the page is aesthetically pleasing: the quotations and their authors as headings and most of the poems either in blocks, tercets or couplets.

The few longer poems are divided into sections and one, 'The brown current', cleverly juxtaposes descriptions of the poet’s present (in two long lines) with recorded details of barbaric and murderous episodes in human history (written as a prose column) - the one interspersed with the other in chronological order from the Spartan Wars to the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre and the aftermath. Towards the denouement of this poem, Emery writes:

... The

future is adrift,

the past a wreck, and maps will never be a substitute for time

and place.

(41)

This and other poems acknowledge the never-ending suffering of humans and the current catastrophic environmental threats to all species but they never become overly despairing. Nature is redemptive. The title poem is a homage to survival and for Emery 'there is hope'. He describes it as: 'sharp as salt, gritty as sand, flickering, shadowy hope' (3).

Most of the poems are true to the Robert Hass quotation: 'Echo, repetition, statement and counterstatement, digression and return' (28). It might sound as though the philosophising in the poems is too abstract to hold one’s attention for long, but Emery has the ability to jump out of his head and describe the setting in which he finds himself so that we can be there with him. Towards the end of 'Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful' he writes:

I’m sitting in a rooftop carpark above a monstrous shopping mall. Rain is pouring down and gusts of wind threaten ...

Is this more fanciful

than to think the earth is fighting back …

(68)

The final poem, 'Broken / Beautiful', is the most memorable. The title itself is illustrated by the image of the poet surfing so close to dolphins that he can see:

... barnacles,

sores, chipped and broken fins, and though beautiful it’s unnerving when that much mammal bursts from a wave.

(69)

The denouement contrasts a homily heard from a 'Unitarian minister' – '"Our love affair with the world /begins with a broken heart”' – with the question, 'Would you believe me if I told you / the world is beautiful and we will break its  heart?' (70).

Emery’s world is a wondrous living entity and his poems do justice to its complexity.

I recently visited a small country town in Western Australia and attended Saturday morning markets. I bought a small plastic tray for $3. A memento, I assumed, from the seller's visit to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. It’s amazing when serendipity occurs. Imprinted on its surface is Johannes Vermeer’s painting The Milkmaid. ‘after The Milkmaid’ is an epigraph in Susan Fealy’s first poem titled 'Made in Delft', and perhaps the first line conveys a museum visit, where ‘White walls melken the daylight’.

Ekphrastic poems loom large in this collection. However, as a reviewer I’m not here to praise how well Fealy defines these works as an inspiration for her poetry. They are merely a backdrop for her visceral language that creates a kind of Droste effect, an image within an image, or her words over art-form: 'The map of the world / Has been painted over':

Only a woman, blond Light from the window, Her wide-mouthed jug And bread on the table. … One can almost taste the milk Escaping her jug.

(15)

An emotional response to this work might be through an ecological valence. The poet responds positively to coloured environmental objects, cultivating Henri Matisse’s blues. 'A certain blue penetrates your soul' is a quote from Matisse and used as an epigraph to the poem 'A Confluence of Blues'. Assorted colours are conveyed in sensual language and provide a visual experience for the reader. Fealy uses the sense of sight (even sound) to convey her various expressions of blue, ones that indeed penetrate the soul: 

... Blue— the frequency of light that lies between violet and green Arthur Dove once said Painting is music of the eyes. A fleet of blues flute violet others oboe green. ...

(18)

This collection published by UWA Publishing is enriched with Fealy’s use of various mediums such as literature, the Melbourne Museum, The Oxford Dictionary, a sculptor, as well Australian artists and poetry. All are referenced as 'Notes' (75-76). Michael Sharkey suggests in his review of Flute of Milk that Fealy’s references

go beyond description of the objects and processes of each object or art-form she considers, to suggest an interest in the causes of artistic inspiration across all the modes of art that strike her eye and mind. On the face of it, her poetry is provoked by surprise confrontations with arresting verbal accounts of events and phenomena, and with artistic work in other modes than poetry. Visual art, plastic arts, film, flower-arrangement, ceramics … they’re collisions of eye with object.

I highlight these lines from 'For Cornflowers to Sing' (responding to Brett Whiteley's Still Life with Cornflowers) and 'The Vase Imposes':

For cornflowers to sing each line must scar its making. There must be light and the idea of a window

(65)

The Master of Flowers respects the economy of nature ─ confines them in slim vessels, quells a mad thirst with still water.

(66)

Leaving the natural world of milk, colour and cornflowers, landscape returns in the poem 'Gouache, Sheep Skulls, Fence Bracket', a stark reminder of our Australian rural countryside and its hardships. The image of sheep skulls as bird-beaks is excellent:

Look closer. The skulls are singing, more like bird-beaks than sheep. Forget-me-knots break across bone as if souls commune, call back, jigsaw a collective self.

(63)

The poem 'Lake Mungo' is an eco-find as is the subject matter of Mungo Lady (aka Mungo Woman). In 1968, young geologist Jim Bowler found burnt bones. Later in 1968 archaeologists John Mulvaney and Rhys Jones probed Bowler’s find and determined that the unmistakable human jaw was an adult female. Fealy re-imagines the lives of Mungo Man and Mungo Lady in a beautiful, evocative way ─ an aboriginal burial per se, 'where the sand blows yesterday / from her face'.

He wants to drive her to a desert where they ghosted her in ochre, buried her, standing upright by a milky singing lake. He wants to walk with her along a curve of shattered moon, where human memory unmade her long ago.

(31)

While landscape is evoked in such phrases as ‘the silhouette of wind’ in 'Faith is Green', and in 'Flute of Milk' where ‘the water flowed and flowed over our arms / undulations of black satin’, the poem goes below the surface in 'How to Dive in Kelp Forest'. Fealy expands on Scott and Nancy Barnett’s 'Tip Sheet on How to Dive KELP in California'. No doubt the thought of being entangled, submerged or trapped in weed creates a sense of alarm for the poet, 'Canopies are so thick, it is like cave-diving'. 

Do not jump into a mess of greenish-gold. Wait for the swing of the boat

to move away. In thick kelp, the surface is not your friend;

sometimes, even the bottom is not your friend.     

And if you’ve ever been caught in a rip – you’ll know the feeling!

Don’t penetrate so deep

you don’t know where out is. ...

(32)

Flute of Milk is a marvellous debut collection from Susan Fealy. I feel like I know her – a little –  having joined her in one of Ron Pretty’s online workshops. I do know that when you are a reviewer and you mine the poetry much deeper for meaning, understanding, emotional engagement or for that sheer love of poetic language, you become more familiar with the poet’s work. I have been rewarded in all aspects. Get a copy and hear her voice, for 'the earth is made of honeyed cake!' ('Two Voices', 72).

Great skill of Geometry, Arithmetic, Perspective, Anthropology and other particular creative Art is behind this collection of 100 algorithmic poems, Euclid’s Dog by Jordie Albiston. With this set of skills shadowed by unlike-human patience, the author has worked hard to bring this panoramic poetry into being with surgical precision.

An exotic flower captured in two ways – one by a high resolution photographic camera and one by an artist – may look the same, yet appear different. Poems by Jordie Albiston in Euclid’s Dog are meticulous creations of an artist. These poems are stand-alone marvels of a literary poetic world.

Mathematical Philosophy has been often employed to argue many logical issues including Politics as seen in the History of world politics. But, employing mathematical means to poetical thoughts is something that needs more of intellectual caution than just creative imagination. As the poet explains in relation to 'plane angle' (112), one can say the same about her poetry: it is comprised of two separate narratives, one intellectual caution and one creative imagination, both meeting and finding resolution in intense, spectral, philosophical meaning.

The poet lists the eight mathematical concepts used as bases for the forms in Euclid’s Dog and also provides extended notes (111-13) without which the collection of poems would become a series of riddles and puzzles to be solved by the target reader.

Albiston’s 100 algorithmic poems are architectural and are grouped under the section headings: 'Enunciation', 'Machinery', 'Proof' and 'Conclusion'. The poems do not have titles in the conventional sense; each title is a mathematical form and these are repeatd throughout the collection, making it more intriguing to the target reader.

There has to be a great start or else no starting at all. The first poem of the collection, under 'Enunciation' based on Euclid’s Proposition 7, Book 1 of Elements, is about two similar triangles sharing a common base. The vertices of the triangles are joined to form two angles and by principle it cannot be proved that one is greater than the other (1). A logical gap begins and ends here. For example, Theism and Atheism are based on same elemental mystery. The two philosophies can be equal, but is impossible to prove that one is greater than the other. The same Euclidian argument can be stretched to a number of existent dualities, be proved wise enough to offer a Lincolnian exclamation, 'Would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar?'

The poet urges the reader to appreciate nature, in the poem beginning ‘you thud headfirst’:

discard the zeros & pick up the bits

discard suburbia wander the earth

imitate those who vent in true voices

imitate anything gentle or blue

listen to countdowns & clocks going off

listen to trees & such urging you on

keep counting until your heart says to stop

keep the shape of it safe in your pocket

—              glimpses like these & then blink it is gone

(2)

There is no gentler way of asking to stop counting one’s money and be aware of one’s ever slipping age.

A prismatic poem that changes colour by each change of perception begins ‘— solutions are strange’:

—solutions are strange    —answers live deep    —in the heart    —you prod & prod    —adding subtracting sadly dividing    —then least expected it    —sweetly arrives the impossible

all August with black board

& chalk she thinks this

poem is Fermat’s last gasp

figuring figuring talking it out

learning to say it “possible”

(4)

When the second stanza answers the first, the reader acknowledges the fact that August indicates old age and also appreciates the wonderfully hidden meaning, where on the threshold of old age, one looks back counting on the added vanity, subtracting the incurred losses, placing incorruptible ego at stake, to finally see that happiness lies in forgiving and acceptance, and considers that it is never late to learn the two precious lessons of life – art of forgiving and art of acceptance.

In the poem, beginning ‘five years old’, the poet stretches to let the reader learn a little of her own self, her place and her careful aesthetic up-bringing:

five years old with the smile & the special

fifty-five years with the miracle grin

& the place & the warm & the ever … time in an egg-cup funny runny time

time to crack ajar those tiny heavens

September is a long way you can’t wait

September gets here quicker every year

… a cicada is as big! as your hand

a night is not as loud as your alarm

you talk to it softly the cicada

you talk through it talk until dawn arrives

—                 peace a kind of gravity & private

(8)

Ever-singing cicada — one’s very heart, the size of one’s very fist, night — death creeps silently and is not loud as when in the state of waking, the poet asks, ‘you talk to it softly’ intending to contemplate and go over one's own consciousness till finding the truth, till finding peace, peace that is individually very personal, serious and powerful.

In the poem beginning ‘—when you lose’ the in-between line reading reveals a different image, with different interpretation:

—when  you lose    —your additive identity   —becomes a zero   —when time equals lines   —in an incidence matrix    —worrying the vertices inside    —of you let go

if you wake to morning

huge with edges & chewing

yesterday’s words to shreds allow

your hours their dreadful arcs

bite that bad data dead

(32)

When one loses one’s identity-ego, one becomes the self (zero). As time passes by and can be counted by lines of age, with effort there can be self-realisation which is a rough truth. It is the times when one looks back and wishes to skip the wrong-doings and wishes to either have never encountered the dreadful or have it redone with evolved consciousness, in accord with the enlightened self. It is not regret; it is just a feeling that passes by wiser minds.

The poet addresses climate change in poem that opens ‘for instance’:

for instance   ducks in a row   it is a necessary thing all things considered … the hedge & something is always ticking bigger than time    how bad is the day    is the world a bad fit    do these words hit your head with a bang?    the world is fitting it froths at the mouth    but order itself costs zip you know    ducks in a row     for instance

(33)

The reader is pushed to deeper thoughts through the expression, ‘something is always ticking bigger than time’, and one cannot miss the implications of the question raised by the poet when she asks, 'do these words hit your / head with a bang?'

The poet anxiously portrays the need of the present, ecologically sensitive hour in the poem beginning ‘let all of it fall away for we are / a bird’:

… given war let us be

peace    olive stick in beak    let us construct tricky quandaries designed to obstruct any angst   I say   given drought we are rain given flood we are sun   & where two cannot work we are one   thus world may be- come the thing we have dreamed   with future & children & none of those bombs of death & life on  a string   let our eyes open to this   for if destiny equals destruct- ion    & the solution thus that we be a bird  therefore etc we are

(36)

Not only does the poet aim at defining ‘freedom’, but also says that ‘it’s unusual for humans to / reach such heights’. In spite of the great odds, the poet assures a hope towards peace.

The same anxiety spills in the poem that opens ‘war is divisible only by war’:

…                                         one day we will all disappear   one day the mountains & oceans will go   & we will go too let war not divide us & cloud out the sun   you see   clouds are dividing   the sky is a heaven   leaves are talking on all of the trees   take my hand & give me yours love only knows love   war only knows war

(38)

A number is divisible by itself and always by a number equal to the least positive integer one. Applying this critically to war foresees the outcome of war that does not allow anyone to think with a clear mind. War plucks away love, as it is born of a clouded mind and it leaves others in a mess, remarks the poet provoking thought.

In a poem opening ‘good morning planet’, the reader is led to wander along with the poet’s habitat:

…                                              good morning rocky outcrops & intertidal flats & salt-marsh & peninsula & flat grassy plats    gull & giant petrel I give you stilt & teal    & orange sunlit parrot meet black duck    this Altona morn- ing oyster catchers squawking making hell

(52)

The poet invites the reader  to experience the wild wind, rocky outcrops, flat yellow ground, periwinkles, spoonbills, ibis plotting paths and feel the gust of the windy day.

A 'golden mean' poem, starting 'breath is expressed', that leaves one breathless by its enchanting imagery of seaside; the second stanza reads:

I dive down deep    the others are way off

the green turtle’s head is as big as mine

I stroke her carapace    she blinks back a

century    the Low Isles sink in an

arc of light    breathe! breathe! everything in    see?

the whole water sparkles    meticulous

(54)

A clear admonition lodges in the mind when the poet says, ‘this is not world   this space / beneath surface   you are not people    but / simple thing’.

The title of the collection appears in a poem which is self-explanatory:

it is so pure    that last gentle breath    & applied    quite gently to death    I hold your face in my palm … …

you are pure    & applied to life    Euclid’s

dog to the last    I don’t shake I don’t shake

you but how can I go on …

(74)

The poet mentions Rainer Maria Rilke’s open which is about death. Rilke’s, ‘The Eighth Duino Elegy’ begins:

Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.

The reader of Albiston’s, ‘it is so pure’, must be aware of Rilke’s eyes else the intensity will be lost. Likewise the poem engulfs polyhedron into its realm to showcase the ‘many dimensional’ love of a dying animal.

Based on a 'square pyramid', another poem that hauls sadness begins ‘what can be said’:

…                        I am no good with good old pain I have no skill with this    I hate that good old talk won’t come    I call & call you will not come    old talk will not come home bang-bang-bang    it shoots me too    & I am just a dog    my dog just died …

(76)

The poet expresses the loss of words, words that do not work in consoling a human of the loss of a being.

Excellent Physics comes into play in a poem beginning ‘the church of logic’, wherein the scientific ‘Logic Gates’ that expresses, in digital language of 0 and 1, universal NAND and NOR gates. These are called universal gates because other basic gate functions can be realised and structured using them. In Logic Gates, there comes a truth table that charts out all possible combinations of the Gate along with its mathematical functional equation. Equipped with this knowledge, the reader has to dive into the poem:

the church of logic stands aloft    its gate is never locked    nand & nor are little gods that nod when you knock    when unreason comes a-knocking in your pretty head    set the formal system ticking then    get the truth-table    lay your chaos out    invite the truth    invoke the rest …

(81)

The poem asks one to label one’s ‘disasters’ as 'inversions of success' and to 'keep illogic locked till kingdom come'. A hope of peace, a hope of logic, a hope of true breath is let afloat in the poem.

The collection comes to a close with a poem beginning ‘for let the two numbers’. It is based on Euclid’s Elements, Proposition 35, Book 7:

for   let the two numbers  A  B   measure any number CD    & let E be the least that they measure   I say that E also measures CD    for    if E does not measure CD    let E    measuring DF    leave CF less than itself    now since A  B   measure E    & E measures DF   thus A   B   will also measure DF   but also the whole CD    thus E cannot fail to measure CD    thus each cannot fail to measure the other & therefore they measure it    QED

(107)

To apply a philosophical edge to this poem, considering the Christian virtues of faith and hope that are closely connected to valour and fortitude, and also the fact that a confident view of life comes from the highest form of courage, the poem sparkles in brilliant intellectual violet.

If Faith (A), Hope (B) measures Valor (C), Fortitude (D), of all encompassing Virtue (E), never letting out the all important Courage (F), Virtue is a measure of faith & hope, if not that, it is a measure of fortitude & courage that leaves valour & courage less than itself. Since faith & hope measures Virtues, & Virtues measures fortitude & courage, thus faith & hope not only measures the whole of fortitude & courage but also the whole of virtues itself.

To weigh Fortitude against Courage, Faith against Hope is also to weigh Fortitude and Courage along with Valour, hence Virtues cannot fail to measure any and all the above and thus Virtue that keeps humanity afloat is a valueless, complete, and necessary quantity for a human to be called human. The human world has to embrace these Virtues to save every other thing, and that is QED – Quod Erat Demonstrandum (L), words that mean, ‘that which was to be demonstrated’. QED is usually placed at the end of a mathematical proof to indicate that the proof is complete. The QED at the end of this poem that comes under the group ‘Conclusion’, and is also the last of 100 Algorithmic poems of Euclid’s Dog, is well achieved by Albiston and reflects her ability and sensitive creativity. A number of such potential philosophical pollens can be gently collected through this blooming poetry. The collection, like the pelican that 'trades places split second with sun' (37), rolls out a bright red carpet for the inquisitive reader to ponder, ponder for long.

Not all poems in Euclid's Dog don philosophic hats; there are some poems that speak of playful childhood, of Saturday’s lawn mowing, of mannerisms, of orchards, of women’s pain-silence, and such.

Unless the reader is ‘inside’ the structural poetic imagination, the language used in reference to it will be certainly no less puzzling. The universe is looked upon in a Euclidean way through the poetic vision of Albiston, and it becomes necessary for the reader to learn to visualise in a Euclidean way and then rear up the intellectual neck of black swan to complete the poet’s black swan’s questioning neck and dance until the heart of poetry emerges.

The intentional missing punctuation, full-stop, at the end of each poem indicates the unending, infinite, multidimensional possibilities of understanding the poetic philosophy. The idea of logical structure, precision, constructive sensitivity of Euclid’s Dog is indeed a rare perception conceived by the poet and it is here to stay as motivating ‘poetical’ force, gaining momentum to perpetuity.

The Artistic Dentistry of Inner City Maban Men

In Tony Birch’s The Guardian article, ‘Too many Australians remain ignorant of Aboriginal writing’, he begins with the sentence:

I discovered the post-national novel on Melbourne's North Richmond railway station in 1971 when I was 15 years old.

This sentence situates him as a reader, as a local, as a boomer. But it also sets up a way to read the rest of the article, which grapples with questions of place and identity. It goes on to suggest that on the one hand Aboriginality is a construct and tool, useful and worth investing in, but also that it can obscure personal heritage by its very linguistic deployment. If in that article, Birch calls for greater understanding, curiosity, engagement with Aboriginal writing by non-Aboriginal audiences, he also enables other readers to realise that identity can be local in such a way that we resist the imagined communities that are concomitant with the nation state. North Richmond (or Carlton or Fitzroy) is not simply Australia then. Kulin (or Noongar or Yolngu) people are not only Aboriginal.

This delicate attention to complex relationships is there in Birch’s poetry collection Broken Teeth, and is something commented on in Stephen Muecke’s introduction:

Few writers love their hometown as ardently as Birch. Read his novels and stories, look at his photographs, listen to him tell tall stories about it, run with him along the contours of its creeks, or stroll with him in the Melbourne cemetery to chat with the dead.  You can be inner-city and global at the same time. (xi)

How can one be connected to what is immediately around one and attentive to that amorphous, indefinable, shifting immensity of the ‘world’? It is there in resources, commodities, objects that circulate and cross boundaries. A gum might belong here but it also is part of the category ‘tree’ or ‘wood’ or ‘plant’. It is there too in the relationships that could be anywhere – in the lovers who look at each other, at the powerful who exploit the powerless, in the children who play on the banks of the Yarra, which turns into the Thames or Bay of Bengal anyway.

Central to Broken Teeth though, and its understanding of the local and the world, is the language of colonialism. It is there in the opening poem ‘A Tree and a Boat’ with the lines: ‘When the ghosts first came they arrived in boats that were once also trees that had always been boats’ (1); it is there in ‘Footnote to a History War (archive box no. 2)’ with its wry, pensive, insightful appropriation of empirical language (18-22); it is there in ‘The True History of Beruk [William Barak] (archive box. 3)’ which begins ‘Captain Cook landed white jacket’ (23-29). In the reclamation of the archive, in telling a story that belongs to a people he could be said to belong with and to, Birch speaks back to silence, erasure, settlement and also offers a critique of typology, categorisation and language itself with nuance and possibility.

Yet to see only the colonial or the critical in this work would do a disservice to the valences of maban that are clearly in Broken Teeth as well. Readers familiar with my work will know my use of maban is similar to the common sense use of it that I know from the Western Pilbara – as in ‘spirit’ or ‘magic’ and which carries with it as much philosophical depth as ‘Geist’ or ‘the invisible hand’. Birch’s maban comes through in an attachment to place that is expressed creatively and one sees it in ‘Exhibition Hotel’ where he writes:

I was sometimes afraid of selling in the pubs the saloon bar men so much like my father they pushed and poured their lager breath all over you women there were different scented with heat all bare skin and bright floral dresses soft rouged cheeks and fat red lips these women would force a sixpence deeply into my pants pocket kiss my lips wet and not concern themselves with the newspaper

(66)

As an evocation of a time and place it is clear, building on the sediment of ideas of typical Australian pubs. But the plain language belies a libidinal quality that is reinforced by the enjambment. It is clearly a personal memory that shows you the rituals of inner city life – not only drinking but also the work of the speaker/Birch as a child. And that might be where we see Birch’s maban particularly, where we make sense of what Muecke means when he suggests that the work has a rooted connectivity to Melbourne and circulates in a global sphere. It takes more than ‘tone’ to achieve that balance, to negotiate those places, to entertain. It takes the ability to sustain a dialectical tension between voice and experiment, which is to say, an ability to know when to hold them, when to fold them and when to walk away. Some might take that as a generous reading of unevenness, of unmerited shifts in style, in the lack of consistency, but the great virtue of Broken Teeth is that it coheres as a project around an abiding attachment to place in a register that is subtly angry, wryly nostalgic and rapturous in places. That is its great charm whether you live right around the corner or in a time and place that could not be further away. And that is why readers should seek this book out and get to know what it is to cut through bullshit, to look at history anew and to acknowledge that maban is possible in Melbourne here and now as well.