A Puppet at the Chessboard Called Real Life

For some time now Oscar Schwartz has been probing, playing with, exploring the boundary between the human and the non-human (often the machine, cyborg, digital). This has been in a range of formats from magazine article (The Monthly) to TedX talk to his popular site ‘bot or not’. This attention to understanding the human through its relationship to Others finds a corollary in animal studies and eco-poetics more generally, a kind of inverted flipside in media res of Schwartz’s oeuvre. In that way, digital Others often seem to allow a way into thinking through ourselves and ‘Nature’ by negation, absence, opposition. The computer is not the same as a parrot. Yet, I want to focus on the animal Others as they come through in Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage, to review who ‘we’ are by someone very much attuned to the contemporary technological apparatus. As a whole, the book discusses pop culture, relationships (particularly close familial ones, friendships and lovers), anecdote and story, philosophy, and suburban upbringings all with a backdrop of a digital age. Animals though offer an entry point in thinking through the collection as a whole.

Schwartz writes in ‘how are you?’:

how you imagined lab rats floating towards freedom on life rafts

(24)

how when you finally slept you slept like a can of tuna that was swallowed by a blue whale

(25)

how when you cried you sounded like a moth trying dutifully to be graceless and forget its vocabulary

(28)

These fragments come from a nine-page sequence where all of the units of the poem begin with ‘how’ as a rhetorical question that remains in the air, unasked. The sequence begins with the lines: ‘how you woke up and thought everyone had been replaced by automated versions of themselves’ and concludes with the lines ‘how love felt like the opposite of practice’. These bookends offer one way of reading the poem, which is as a comment on the paradoxical nature of emotion – of the fuzzy ground between reality and artifice, on whether crying can ever be dutiful, whether cans sleep, whether lab rats know freedom, whether love is practice, whether we have, always already, been automated versions of ourselves from before the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction to after it in this here time. That might be the spine of Schwartz’s practice – discovering who we really are by finding the border cases that are liminal. This concern is there too in ‘pet weasel’:

when your pet weasel died around one week ago you threw its body into a street-side rubbish bin and you cleaned out the cage with disinfectant soon after a friend from school came over to watch a movie you were sitting together in your room “i wonder if I could fit in that cage?” the friend said “you should try” you replied the friend was small and flexible and managed to squeeze in you both laughed you closed the latch to the cage and you both laughed some more a few moments went by your friend stopped laughing “ok you can let me out now” your friend said

(45)

The lack of a stanza break after ‘disinfectant’ forced me to re-read the first few lines, to take stock of what was happening beyond simple meaning, to see its plain speech as a kind of practiced poetic technique that occurs throughout the book as a whole. When coupled with the death of an animal, the dismissive disposal of the pet (‘threw its body’), the weaselising of the human through ‘your’ caging, the one sided laughter, the direct address, the poem creates a kind of uneasiness, which is compounded by the flatness of the affective style and spare voice. There are, of course, other emotional registers in The Honeymoon Stage and I found a counterpoint in ‘honestly how could you have known’. Though this latter poem does not settle the reader completely, its humour is wry and reassuring, ending in a kind of mock heroism and pop culture critique.

The engagement with technology is foremost in The Honeymoon Stage particularly at the level of content (‘what side of the bed does your clone sleep on?’). It is there too in a permeable atmosphere, sideways glances and interruptive gestures. What it offers though is a screenshot of where we are right now, of the peculiar material expressions of our engagement with the tools of today. It is not to say there is no difference to an automaton that was constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, but that it might no longer need a hookah in its mouth. What we need from technology, or poetry, differs for every user or reader, but in the languages that describe this terrain, Schwartz is a perceptive, charismatic and able guide who I look forward to joining once more some day in the near future.

‘And the award goes to … ’: Judgement Day and the Dissolution of the Natural / Unnatural Binary in Nathan Curnow’s The Apocalypse Awards

it’s too late to redirect the judging panel now it’s nothing but an organised slum tour past the decorated tree that killed the teen four horsemen in the avenue of honour

An ‘apocalypse’ is traditionally associated with a world-ending, catastrophic and often biblical cataclysm. In recent times, with global warming and animal extinction increasingly more severe, the end of the world is quickly becoming a very real threat. Environmentalist movements have emerged to help address such concerns, and serve as the overarching umbrella for the many subsets of environmentalist theory. Within this field, ecocriticism seeks to analyse generated texts such as fiction and poetry through the lens of environmentalism, the portrayal of the environment and the relationship between the human and non-human (Pippa 2013).

It is typical in the genre of environmentalist literature to frame the apocalypse as a massive disaster, often caused by the many issues eco-critics find with humankind’s mistreatment of the earth – this can manifest as a climate crisis caused by pollution from consumerist waste, overpopulation of the planet with overreliance on unsustainable energy such as coal, to anxieties about nuclear weapons causing destruction on a massive scale. Contrary to expectations, however, Curnow has included an epigraph from Neil Gaiman that reads ‘there’s no big apocalypse, just an endless procession of little ones’. The quote suggests that, instead of a climactic, earth-rendering Doomsday, the apocalypse is a mosaic of minor disasters chipping away at the state of civilisation – and that we may, indeed, already be in the thick of it. On Curnow’s website, he describes the poetry collection as follows: ‘inspired by the absurdity of the world [it] charts our collective obsession with the end times’, and true to his word, he takes these environmental issues and transforms them through the poetic lens as surreal, disconcerting and uncanny. Curnow’s The Apocalyse Awards is best described in this fashion as a poetry collection documenting the many little disasters of the postmodern condition, turned twisted and bizarre through the poetic lens.

The visual element to Curnow’s collection illustrates this concept appropriately. The cover image is a representation of Stephen Ives’ ‘Dolor (For Whom the Bell Tolls)’. Interestingly, Ives created this sculpture from a Barbie model horse, and has warped it into what resembles a horseman of the apocalypse, with a skeletal rider and the mount itself ethereal and strained against an invisible force. The horse’s rider has a gas mask suspended in front of its face and holding a lance on which, barely perceptible until closer inspection, a miniscule elderly man is walking. The addition of this man enforces scale to the piece, making the mount and its master seem monstrously gigantic in comparison. The deathly and macabre image that has emerged out of the materialistic product of the Barbie horse is an apt reminder of the relationship between humankind and our own downfall. Despite all the chaos that is surrounding us in the world, it is always humans who are leading the charge.

The postmodern style of Curnow’s poetry calls back to famous modernist poets such as T S Eliot in 'The Waste Land' which frames contemporary society as a catastrophic mess of debris of infrastructure, human nature, classic, mythical and modern cultural iconography, all fragments of memory from a time long past (Bennett & Royle, 2004). In the poem ‘Meteorite’, a farmhand living in deplorable conditions finds said meteorite and ‘reads it Gilgamesh and Ozymandias’ behind the chicken coop. There is a contrast between the classical literature that forms the skeleton of Curnow’s landscape and the death and decay that is constantly ongoing in the poetic landscape. Likewise, in ‘Library’, the speaker and the crusaders protecting the library are entrenched amongst pop culture classics such as A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and warm themselves with the memory of the fires at Alexandria. The unspoken threat in this poem is that there must naturally be something that the ‘bookish guards’ must protect against, and like the fires of Alexandria, book burnings are associated with the systematic destruction of knowledge and a societal regression that is inherently detrimental. The result, as the speaker acknowledges, is ‘a mix between The Road and World War Z’, another comparison between literary and genre fiction with Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel and Max Brooks’ novel depicting a zombie apocalypse. Both books present a society of savagery, cannibalism and humanity turning on itself for survival.

It is notable that Curnow’s suite 'The Lullaby Pregnancies', depicts an image of reproduction and pregnancy as distorted and strictly policed. While the traditional pastoral emphasises fertility as an inherently natural and comforting imagery, Curnow inverts that image by portraying pregnancy as a sort of plague that ‘came before locusts and deep image colour’ that is being curtailed by a shadowy organisation known as ‘Team Love’. These poems are disturbingly anti-pastoral, as ‘corrective’ of the pastoral by highlighting ‘tension, disorder and inequalities’ (Slovic 2012, 54). The collection touches on issues of overpopulation, in a world so devastated it is no longer sustainable for human life and reproduction has been outlawed. Discussions around overpopulation as an issue, as well as Curnow’s poetry, position human reproduction as a blight against the natural environment, and humanity itself as a disease that needs to be controlled and contained.

The brutality of this world is most effectively shown in the second poem, ‘Blossom’, where the speaker recalls that ‘every day a coat-hanger appears at my door – an invitation a threat a promise’. This could be considered a reverse Handmaid’s Tale, the likenesses to Margaret Atwood’s famous story of a female apocalypse not lost in the translation to poetry. In this world, doctors who performed abortions prior to the rise of the Christian fundamentalist regime are routinely sought out and executed, their bodies strung up on hooks for display on the wall enclosing them all. Offred, Atwood’s protagonist, tells us that ‘it’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time’ (1985, 43), their retroactive punishment exhibited as a warning to women who would deny their ‘natural’ purpose. In Curnow’s universe, instead, women are reduced to their biological functions in the sense that they are violently prohibited from bearing children, and the connotations between the artificial metal of coat-hanger and the organic process of child-bearing is particularly striking. Rather than a crime worthy of a lynch mob as in Atwood’s vision of an apocalyptic future, abortion is instead gruesomely enforced. In both worlds, ‘it is only the inside of [a woman’s] body that is important’ – that is, her ability or inability to bear children (Atwood 1985, 107).

The image of the inorganic as a pollutant of the natural world is a consistent theme of Curnow’s collection, as symptom of a much larger sickness inflicted on the earth: humankind, and our waste. One such example can be found in the poem ‘Scrimshaw’, wherein the speaker describes the sea:

she lifts her skirt and the sea foams in with a colourful flotsam of plastics a mouthful of ping pong turtle eggs

Here the distinctions between natural and unnatural are blurred, as synthetic items are described as natural phenomenon, such as ‘squid ink mayonnaise’ or ‘cookie cutter sharks biting’. In this poem, Curnow depicts a world that has become so saturated in the material that it has become indistinguishable from the natural world. The blame for the state of the world – that is to say, the ‘winner’ of the Apocalypse Awards – is obstinately placed in the hands of humanity, and our inability to recognise apocalypse until the world is literally falling apart at our feet. Curnow’s poetry fixates on the ways that humankind has erred, and the alarming vividness of the images that he creates is testimony to that. It is interesting the way that Curnow has created a microcosm of disaster in each poem, each seemingly unrelated but psychically linked in the grim realisation that the apocalypse may already be happening around us, but we cannot look, or simply refuse to see.

Making atoms is a cosmic affair, loud and fiery (in the right atmosphere), electric charges approaching and combining before they settle down into their unique patterns. Unmaking atoms is a sad and lonely affair, watching energy disappearing bit by bit with no sense of order.

Broken artefacts and bottles scattered beads excavated as broken promises repeating fractals material culture can’t bring back my face though you keep looking         

(‘Artefacts’, 16)

Magdalena Ball gives us a fractured world, a world filled with shards of our former selves and a sense of disintegration (just barely recognisable as coming from our consciousness):

How will I with all my limitations deep in samsara crawling on broken knees find you? Is the connection between us me in this life you in another so tenuous untethered by those bonds we once thought permanent?

(‘Past Life’, 23)

These poems are a bleak recognition of grief and loss,

A perfect reminder I didn’t need of failed bargains and broken promises.   

(Irrational Heart’, 49)

For the first two sections (of the seven in the book), there is almost no colour, no sense imagery – mainly mathematical images, often of fractals repeating themselves over and over in an endless rendition of the poet’s grief and the unwillingness of that grief and loss to change shape:

inside fires burn the bed might be inviting but I force myself further into the great chaos  

(‘Rough Ride’, 41)

Halfway through the collection, colours begin to appear: dawn colours for the first time ­ 'pink, blue, grey lights reflecting in/ winter emptiness' (‘Walking into Eternity’, 62), the red of Mars (66), or ' … early spring/ just before dusk/ light fading to soft green' (68).

The poet – suddenly, it seems – notices the world of the senses:

You’ll tell me I’m Garlic, the good girl heady with the pleasure of service 

(‘Shallots and Garlic’, 70)

and, on the next page,

the sweet acid tang of absence and wanting more. 

(‘Silence; the coffee cup, the table', 71)

But this seems almost against the poet’s will, this return to the living. ‘Most of Everything Is Nothing’ (74) begins with

I wrote a list in blood taking my time eking out the fantasy

 but ends with

nothing has changed not even me a conduit of buzzing atoms moving my kinetic heat ­ as I grasp an unwieldy red crayon with the stubby fingers of a child and begin to bleed.

The section ‘Robin’s Eye’ uses images from all the senses and – while still talking about grief and loss – does so in terms that reflect on the living world. Granted, the poet says, 'Colour is a private sensation / anyway, like fear', but in spite of herself she begins to come back

into this new space, charged by discomfort every day, it’s like a new start into an old wound.    (‘Old Wounds’, 99)

Throughout the collection, the poet shifts between speaking in an everyday vocabulary and in a mathematics / physics register. This is elegantly handled in a way that keeps both in play. Vivid descriptions of a concrete world still keep the mathematics alive above it, rather like a descant, because we don’t go far without some reference to the patterns and forces that shape this same world.

Various poems are tributes to other poets, either in that they are redactions of or they are built on quotes from Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich. These are placed effectively – in particular, the first three poems of the book acknowledge three earlier poets before launching, appropriately, into ‘Artefacts’.

I found this collection a bit difficult to get into – but it was worth the effort, making the vividly signposted journey from abstraction back into a three-dimensional world.

There is something primal that draws us to water. We emerge from a sac of it, we learn play in its shallows, we build our dwellings on its edges, we seek and shrink from its sounds and movement throughout our lives. It is this connection that drew me to Undercurrents. I wanted to see how Amanda Bell merges her discoveries of river systems with the personal and historical, and how she expresses this in poetic form.

Undercurrents is a collection of haibun featuring sometimes single and often a series of related haiku, forms that demand exactness and serve the purpose of this collection well. Using a contemporary syllabic count, Bell’s powerful employment of the essential pause with the undercutting shift in these incorporated haiku, makes for arresting poetry. Bell provides wider perspectives through the prose of the haibun which then acts as a springboard into the haiku, or is it, that the reflection of the haibun springs from the revelation of the haiku? It is the integration of the two that is so satisfying. Whether one dips into a haiku here and there, or whether a more linear approach is taken through a systematic reading of the haibun, Undercurrents delivers a poetry and narrative that is rewarding to the senses and illuminating in our understanding of the selected aquatic ecosystems.

The reader’s satisfaction is enhanced by the structure of this book which supports the metaphorical and actual drift of the Irish waterways to which we readers are introduced. The poetry invites us to consider the flow of time, mortality,

cutting this year’s wood for next year’s fires – who will feel its warmth?

(24)

the wandering of the human heart,

hillwalkers – laughter cushioned in pine needles

(20)

the interruptions and the forces over which we have so little sway, and always the way we have sought to control and manage and take benefit from the natural currents of our rivers:

greylag geese graze as the bog road reappears – floating thatch reeds

(11)

But there is a thread of lightness in the poetry, a wry slant as in this haiku from 'Gravel Beds', which appropriates the cultural symbol of wedding bands, but bounces from the haibun reflecting on the birthing of the poet’s second daughter:

nesting time – blackbird searching for a mate, gold rings in his eyes

(43)

or this from 'Seawards', where Bell shows the inherent power of river systems where she lives; “my neighbourhood is suspended like a hammock over the River Swan, all seventeen kilometres of whose convoluted course culverted and converted into storm drains and sewers” (48). These rivers have been tamed, diverted, built over and yet, water finds its way:

home from work a welcoming committee of floating chairs

(48)

Bell prefaces our entry into this book by noting the parallels between rivers, family history and personal recollection. She notes the surprises, and that is exactly what this book reveals. Undercurrents is a book of wonder and intrigue, both in its capturing of these watery landscapes, its respect for the intertwined ecosystem and its delivery of the interrelated human story.

It is reminiscent of the approach taken by Alice Oswald’s early and book length poem, Dart (2002) in which Oswald creates a fictional account of the juncture of the river and the characters who live and work on and beside it. In contrast, Bell uses her own experience, alongside documented and anecdotal accounts of interaction with the waterways, to create this poetry. Such immediacy gives her work authenticity and facilitates a specificity of place that is enhanced by the language choices Bell makes. Most importantly it invites the reader into an instant and direct involvement with the poet and the poetry.

The Australian environmental historian, Erica Nathan, writes of this human connection described from a female perspective, as the great absence in our national environmental history. She highlights the limitations of a gendered history and seeks to amend that. I am less familiar with the documented history of waterways in Ireland but suspect Amanda Bell may be providing a similar redress in Undercurrents. The book’s structure of haibun prose and haiku nestling together is effective in placing the river sites in a broader understanding of environmental history and landscape. Importantly, Bell’s approach furthers the personal connection, both in the interface of human action and environment and of poet to poetry.

The waterways chosen for this collection are those with which the poet has a personal connection, a connection she sometimes overtly shares, but at other times, it is as if we are peeking into her reflections, her noticing. 'Preserved' (28) depicts this shift. Initially she invites us to walk with her around Louch Conn in County Mayo, to feel the footfall of our feet in the bog, the deceptive give of the sphagnum moss:

the walker is faced with heather tufts, drifts of dancing cotton, and tracts of bog which betray themselves only by the shiver extending out from beneath the weight of your tread. Spongy hummocks of red and green Sphagnum moss promise a firm foothold but often deceive … 

(28)

But then the shift occurs as she is telling us of her discovery

Ascending the hill, the terrain becomes drier. Bog gives way to stone, moss to gorse, cotton to thorn. By ear I locate a mountain stream …

(28)

For a time, she is absorbed in the solitary action of discovering a waterfall and pool into which she slips, “Crossing the pool my bones ache with cold". The first of the haiku reflects this private reflection:

limbs glowing amber through ferrous water – evening stillness

(28)

But the ensuing series of five haiku, through close attention to plant and insect species, brings us back to the heart of the concepts flowing through this collection – wonder and transience:

fraughan seedlings in the moss – their first season

(30)

It was an introduction, many years ago, to the lost path of The Farset in Belfast that alerted  me to the evolving social history of river systems, so I was particularly drawn to the poetry of 'Flotsam' based around The Poddle (58) described in the haibun as “the best known of Dublin’s hidden rivers”. We are told that during the 1835 flood repairs, Dean Jonathan Swift’s coffin was opened and, “His skull removed for examination by the British association for the advancement of Science … in an effort to determine the cause of the deafness and vertigo suffered by the Dean throughout his life” (58-59):

water courses roaring underground – below hearing

(59)

My discomfort in the reported treatment of this man’s corpse is juxtaposed alongside my admiration for the tight, clever haiku that ensued. But worse was to come as I read in the next haibun of the 2011 floods when the waters, not able to flow out to sea, erupted back up through the drains and a “hospice nurse Cecilia de Jesus, unable to force open the door of her apartment against rising water, was drowned” (59). From this haibun, no haiku ensue. Perhaps an opportunity is lost, where the poet might have highlighted the social and historical reality of it being the most vulnerable who are at greatest risk, in this case, the migrant workers who are most exposed to the ferocity of a river system that can never be fully tamed.

Encountering the interface of human behaviour and landscape portrayed in playful colourful imagery is a lovely counter to such frightening depictions of water power or the prosaic elements of water management. In the final haibun, ‘Casting Off’, Bell foregrounds the necessity of boiling water in the Callow Water Scheme and consequent benefits to local retailers. But it is in the image of the family creating a raft “by cramming the space in the middle of a wooden pallet with empty water bottles, and launch(ing) it in the Spaddagh River, a small spawning stream running into the Moy” (67) that gives the poetry its life, in a playful response to challenging aspects of this river environment. The poet uses multi-sensory imagery in the next passage of the haibun with a striking depiction of place encompassing children and cattle, fun and colour, the sound of water and the sting of midges:

It was late August; the air was thick with seeds and midges and the small of cattle. The raft soon ran aground on a muddy bank where livestock came to drink. In their matching floral bathing suits, the girls daubed one another with fresh green dung, and draped riverweed about their heads and shoulders, transforming themselves into naiads. (67)

The environmental irony is presented as a circular argument. The beauty in the joyfully poetic, in the almost classic pastoral scene, ensues from the damaged ecosystem with its undrinkable water. But perhaps Bell is edging in a hopeful note with the portrayal of the life-giving nymphs and a future they will create.

Bell’s final twist occurs in what I found to be one of the most poignant haiku of all, in furthering the notion of impermanence, and, in particular, the fleeting nature of childhood. Having gifted us with the image of the two girls as life-giving water nymphs, she then ends the book with the reminder that we creatures are all readying our young for flight.

scent of meadowsweet – swallows readying themselves for flight

(67)

Amanda Bell has provided us with a poetic narrative that is fresh and compelling, so much so, that these places have, for this reader, merged into my own geographic history and lexicon. I suspect that Undercurrents is likely to have some readers trekking along the banks of these watercourses, as if revisiting a river once known in childhood.

The use of a less conventional text format which juxtaposes the freedom of the sparse prose of the haibun with the preciseness of the haiku gives the reader an experience of proximity and sensory discovery. There is nothing didactic about Bell’s poetry. Ecological perspectives of the river systems she explores, flow through to the reader by showing rather than telling. It is as if Bell has incorporated the principles of haiku in the entire text of Undercurrents. She has captured the physical essence of these Irish river systems at a moment in time and offers us flashes of insight.

… & /, what truly astonished Louis Nowra in his recent review of Contemporary Australian Poetry[i] was that most of the poets in that collection although living and working in the city, perversely turned their backs on the urban environment. Not so Pam Brown, whose 2015 collection of verse Missing up[ii] distinctly interprets traces of the city, the title of each piece effortlessly incorporated into a notational verse structure. Written over three years, this corpus is urbane, parochial, (“disliking Bondi Junction”, 145) and self-deprecating. Brown’s collection is multifocal, irreverent (“the dolt in residence” 93) and cacophonous,

varying repetitive sounds

went off

on the street

& a shrieking siren

en route to rescue

or raid

(26)

It’s a conurbation of ‘Collected melancholy’,  stories of – among others,

a bipolar daughter

cherishing her hands

(130)

coupled with the natural world, where the landscape is “wearing out” (130). For fear of too much melancholia, Brown, boldly polemical, goes “where no manifesto / dares to go…” (125) in ‘Here’s to you’, and in ‘Non-responder’ (“guess the ideology / in this one”, 99) and in ‘Blank lyric’ drily noting, “money buys stuff / there’s probably / more stuff than people” (109).

Val Plumwood calls for writers to engage in “the struggle to think differently, to remake our reductionist culture”[iii] and become “open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter.”[iv] Angus Fletcher maintains that poetry is “bound to stimulate an awareness of varying conditions of life and ‘living through’, [to] engage a willingness or refusal to experience these [as a process to] include a willingness to discover where the self is and where it lives through its experiences.”[v] Brown’s ‘Twelve noon’, is an imaginative wrestle between reminiscence and moment. Rifling through her memory she shuttles between evocative flashes from the past and derisive verdicts of the present – “at last / a C21 moment!” (86), persistently adjudicating the increasing complexity of her mental and physical dwelling place.

Brown’s poems are strategically punctuated by a visual composition of themed monochrome cropped-snap-shots in a network of connected and unconnected fragments, composed through the sociolect of an urbanite; a poiesis of continuous, pulsating (“tiny twitching”, 29) movements. Worded space, paginated silences and purposeful suspensions contract the expression of her social reality. The seemingly arbitrary stanzaic construction is reminiscent of a child’s play at hopscotch – akin to the jump at the beginning, one foot down, the other poised with inbreath, to lunge into space – and land all over again. Nowra is right, her short lines have bounce.[vi] Brown is deeply and wordfully spellbound by the city, the dwelling-thinking place-space, the Umwelt of her surrounding urban environs, her worded reflections strung like light bulbs across streetscapes. The ‘West End blues’, “click” (12) “flick” (13) is “where the poems say / more /…” (10) and less, as you leap up, momentarily off the ground, to alight, ‘A second ago’ with Schuyler’s peonies and Nelson’s bluets

… out walking

the town

& surrounds

the sky

a grubby blue

above the shifting mist

(27)

There is a conversational quality to her expression, allusions to thinking, art, authors and inventiveness wherein ‘& Surrounds’ ampersand Klimt & Kraus and ‘Gifted’, Saint-Exupéry. “Donna Haraway / invents / canny declarative statements” (70) amid The Simpsons who opine “never try” (72) in ‘This whole thing’, where the poet’s stream of consciously discursive thinking finds a reality pestered and “bitten by the faux midge” (69), as Brown makes known that “here in the midge world, you’re caught / no one’s actually listening” (73) – or are they? Without hesitation, if you listen-through-reading to ‘Inklings’, the words in the audible feeling of “scraping / a squashed raisin / from a floor tile” (64) can only make room for a denser appreciation of “continual life” (64). ‘Inklings’ is also a poem for those who have planted nemesia seed, the miniscule seeded inkling of life, which when bloomed is “golden / moment-brightening” (65). Brown as great noticer –

 I use my eyes

more

than my ears

(this is the city)

(12)

– seems to be confounded by the microscopic seed for its radiant gift. If the reader is ignorant of the nemesia seed then, in my eyes, they will be forever Hansel – “tracing the postman’s” (67) pebbled bread-crumbed

        red rubber band trail down the footpath …

(67)

and missing out on … nemesia’s moment-brightening blooms.

The shuttling between her expressed thought and our unassimilated references, ultimately manifest as a network of living words, revealing through its generative structure – realisation. Following Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden’s propositions of literary “places of indeterminacy,”[vii] Brown’s enjambments, gaps, compositional blanks and short horizontal line structures, stimulate the reader to configure meaning by leaping from line down to line and filling in blanks “interpreting the sonorous remnant into full existence,”[viii] as when we are led off in unexpected directions, we fill in our own gaps to create a richer realisation. It is through this convergence between text and reader that the work becomes manifest, awakening our responses. Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.”[ix] Brown runs that fine risk, at no time starving us of complexity but reinvigorating poiesis, into its own existent language, making us all run the dangerous possibility of transcendence through realisation – the possibility we may reformulate ourselves – through an encounter with the worded other, the alterity of the city scape and the otherwise of the self in the Umwelt. Brown’s work echoes Plato’s chora, a spatiality, a place of environing spaces, full sometimes, often empty, all of which has life – if even at the subatomic level – all of which comes and goes.

From the space of the street, ‘Blank lyric’ questions the street itself. “What does the street know?” (102) the poet asks, only to answer with a chronicle of dissolution and disillusion. The verse is a time capsule, shuffling between now and the 1970s, a provoking microcosm of the-now and the-then. One hundred and twenty-two pages into the collection we land with hopscotch feet together on Missing up. I find expectations high when the title of the work appears. But the title work is short, two pages, left justified, except for the indent as an entrance space for a blowfly “in through the doorway / and out again …” (122) adroitly, with no full-stop at the end. It’s both a messing and a missing

that drove you to disappear and hole up beyond location

(123)

in

 ... the opinion of the specialist on your body of work

(123)

Not without irony, there follows ‘Continuous improvement’, sixteen pages of verse demonstrating loose elements of an open-field poetics, distinctive of Brown’s structural execution. At her most irreverent she asserts that those who celebrate the birthday of the ancestors

 who surely

care no longer

(139)

will need to

light three sticks for continuous improvement

(139)

Had Brown’s collection ended with the overall sentiment in ‘Continuous improvement’ – that here in this world we find no trace of the public good “not / anywhere/ now” (147), then perhaps thoughtful readers would finish her corpus with heavy heart. Fortunately, brewing ‘Rooibos’ rescues the reader from despondency. Here we catch sight of Brown’s vocational sass, as she reflects during late afternoon when “there’s less than an hour / to wring / colour / from the backyard sky,” (152) that in writing poetry –

… there’s always

‘the things it’ll do

not to be a sonnet’

(153)

As a final remark, if an epigraph holds meaning, then the lines “we / have always made the sun come up” from Alice Notley’s City Of [x] evoke the number of references to poets in Brown’s collection. If trouble be taken to read Notley’s fuller lines we find a group of people re-counting the time they

... were in the parlor of a modest home with window shades

listening to a CD, several of us /

We heard the dead poet read

a poem which ended with sun-up

Another dead poet sat across the room

listening: but we were all the same one

singing. We

have always made the sun come up.[xi]

And the image on the cover of City Of? – a satellite dish scanning up, listening for the poet – to make the sun come up.  

The title of Jennifer Maiden’s latest collection initially seems to have only a tenuous link to the highly detailed, politically focused poems within. But the name is apt for at least two reasons. First, these are poems that function as markers in time, documenting the fluctuations of recent history along with a wider historical context. Second, the book continues, even crescendos, the rhythms that have persisted in Maiden’s work since 2005’s Friendly Fire.

We cannot assume that Maiden wrote the poems in this collection with an ecopoetic framework in mind, but it is possible to identify broad priorities that resonate with ecopoetic thinking, particularly the poetic methods Jonathan Skinner suggests “model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling”.[i] Maiden consistently prioritises the complex and specific over the simple and general. She also displays a concern with the work of recording and re-using these specificities, along with a desire to represent the interconnectedness of her subjects.

The specificity of Maiden’s writing is one of its defining features. Real people, real places and historical facts provide not only the subjects for her poems but the content that moves each poem forward at the line level. In “‘I Want to be a Turkmen Warlord’”, for example, memories of a childhood rhyme lead to details of the moment when:

ISIS in Syria was ferrying truck on truck of oil to Turkey at cheap prices, paid by the ruling family, the US hesitated to bomb because the truck drivers were civilians, but then Putin bombed them, anyway, and where these days can you buy cheap oil if not from ISIS and that indeed is the reason oil prices have fallen and the Saudi economy is a mess

(“‘I Want to be a Turkmen Warlord’”, 25)

ISIS, Syria, Putin and the Saudi economy are not topics many Australian poets would tackle in a single poem, but in The Metronome they are just as suitable as childhood memory. Whether examining geopolitics or a childhood rhyme, Maiden remains in direct contact with the details of specific events, rather than retreating toward smooth generalities.

This foregrounding of specificity occurs again and again throughout The Metronome. Rather than speak about animal cruelty in broad terms, for example, Maiden instead creates an imagined quote for Jeremy Corbyn, who says “I opposed / the dogs-for-meat slaughter in Yulin.” (“The Gazelle”, 4). And instead of including Malcolm Turnbull merely as a conservative Australian politician, Maiden goes much further, imagining a conversation between Turnbull and William Bligh in which we have time to consider Turnbull’s relationship to his uncle, his mother and even the fact that his mother “won a Guggenheim / to research the link between Victorian workers, / Feminism and the fight against Vivisection.” (“Temper”, 39).

The cumulative effect of these specificities, referred to in one poem (through George Jeffreys) as “vital trivia” (“Clare and Nauru”, 14), is that Maiden’s readers are never off the hook. She has of course invented these conversations between George Jeffreys and Clare Collins about Nauru, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt about various pre-election scandals, and Jeremy Corbyn and Constance Markievicz about the contours of their political views, but the web of particulars that holds each poem together feels more true than the content of any news article. We cannot escape into the comfort of a simplified narrative. Each new detail shocks us back to attention, mounting a convincing case for the position Maiden gives to Corbyn: “‘Neatness / always does seem to be a lie.’” (“The Gazelle”, 9).

Maiden is not exclusively concerned with recording details of the recent past. She is just as interested in creating a space where forgotten and neglected subjects can exist on equal par with the various outrages of the moment. In “‘Turn Again, Wittington’”, for example, Bernie Sanders’ surprising win in Michigan, his loss in Ohio and his will to continue campaigning regardless leads to thoughts of London:

I thought of the Bow bells intoning ‘Turn again’ which is why maybe I wrote this. The London Blitz blew up the Bow bells, but they were rebuilt a decade later amidst Mary-blue plaster, still shouting in their sleep to Whittington, still mourning each apprentice in the river

(“‘Turn Again, Whittington’”, 56-57)

The relationship between Sanders’ story and this history of Bow Bells may not be obvious, but their juxtaposition suggests the way events sometimes echo and double back on each other, rather than proceed along a predictable trajectory.

Through her signature device of tracking conversations between two or more figures, Maiden creates a space where these reverberations can be explored. These poems magnify the particulars of each speaker’s story, giving them time to consider their relationships to one another along with their own actions. The final poem in the collection, for example, takes us into George Jeffreys’ hotel room as he muses to Clare Collins on the unfolding results of the 2016 US election:

‘I met Trump a few times in the City. At a couple of bars and a dinner. He gave money to Prisoners of Conscience, maybe thought we were the CIA one, by mistake. At any rate, we agreed on nothing but being against Globalism – though that was ever at those boring troughs, a cheerful bond in hate.’

(“George Jeffreys: 20: George Jeffreys Woke up in Washington”, 74-75)

This may feel like too minor a moment to dwell on, especially in a poem about such a cataclysmic event. But this is also the kind of detail a poem that prizes particulars needs to include. We don’t often remember them, but even the most shocking days will also contain at least a few minutes of relatively mundane reflection.

It’s worth pausing here to look at the place Maiden creates for herself between these imagined conversations. When we zoom in on the poet herself she appears as confident creator, fully aware of the wider response to her work. Nowhere is this more clearly spelled out than in “Jennifer Maiden woke up outside the Fourth Wall”:

It’s always been quite puzzling that so many critics and poets try to mimic my device that someone woke up somewhere, but substitute my name for the ones I explore, as if no one else had done it.

(“Jennifer Maiden woke up outside the Fourth Wall”, 41)

Maiden goes on to explain that the dialogue between the speaker who wakes up and their conversational counterpart are “the point […] of / the packed form”, adding that no one who has recreated this form has included her own dialogue: “So far, in / none of their constructs do I reply”.

Maiden’s presence inside her own work is another way The Metronome highlights the blanks that occur when we insist on linear narratives. Maiden is interrupting the traditionally one-way conversation between critic and poet, exposing the messier back-and-forth that takes place behind the static printed/digital word. And because Maiden is so present, the reader is required to maintain their presence as well. There is no question of checking out for a line or two. We must remain alive to our own responses and our role as readers.

This emphasis on engagement and specificity results in an accumulative rather than linear structure to the collection as a whole. As each poetic conversation progresses and details mount, we begin to see the interconnectedness of Maiden’s subject matter. “Diary Poem: Uses of Catalonia” is an example of this layered, non-linear structure. The poem begins with “Hilary Benn’s dreadful, dreadfully / overrated speech to the House of Commons in favour / of bombing Syria” (27). Maiden notes Benn’s comparison to the Spanish Civil War, then brings in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Next, after discussing her daughter Katharine’s love of Catalan, Maiden goes on to include a number of passages in Catalan itself. As the poem gathers speed, it moves into a bracketed section in which Maiden speaks metapoetically:

(And, yes, that should always be the poet: a shivering enemy to secrets. Remember, Richard Rees wrote that in Barcelona Orwell’s wife’s face was the first time he’d seen ‘the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror.’ But later even use of Catalan names was outlawed in Madrid.) Still, that poem, of course, was not really ever About Catalonia. I wrote it the night Assange went into the Embassy.

(“Diary Poem: Uses of Catalonia”, 30)

As this poem ends, a network of sorts begins to appear between its subjects: Catalonia, politics, terrorism, Assange, Sweden, Britain and the writing of a poem about these topics are all part of a “feedback loop”. While not directly related, each subject sparks off the others. As readers we begin to see the impossibility of writing that is both true and clean—that neatness may indeed be a lie.

The pace of current events since this book’s publication might well have meant it became dated before leaving the warehouse, but in fact many of these poems feel absolutely relevant. They have survived a feverish news cycle precisely because they consistently eschew neatness and remain willing to grapple with complexity. The collection reaffirms the now familiar argument that managing challenges like climate change, or the ever-widening economic divide, requires that we look closely rather than swatting at these issues with catchphrase solutions like “austerity” or “clean energy targets”. The great strength of The Metronome is that it takes the time to do this work. This is poetry that watches the news, reads history, but knows reality is never so straightforward.

Nathanael O’Reilly, himself a poet and Australian Studies academic, has brought together a significant range of previously published and unpublished poems of Anna Wickham (1883-1947) in this new selection from UWAP. As well as including 100 poems chosen from the five books which Wickham published during her lifetime (Songs of John Oland 1911, The Contemplative Quarry 1915, The Man with a Hammer 1916, The Little Old House 1921 and Richard Shilling’s Selections 1936), O’Reilly introduces us to 150 new poems located in the British Library, thereby making widely available Wickham’s considerable oeuvre for a contemporary readership..

Born Edith Alice Mary Harper in London in 1883, Wickham had a turbulent childhood when her mother left an unhappy marriage, taking Edith with her to Australia. Although later to return to England, Wickham professed her connection to Australia, adopting her writer’s pseudonym from a Brisbane Street. Wickham’s adult life continued to be disrupted and peripatetic as she moved between London and Paris, to and from her own unhappy marriage and in and out of liaisons with other bohemian writers and artists such as D.H. Lawrence and Natalie Clifford Barney. Wickham’s life - and the prolific poetry which she produced – is in many respects emblematic of a time of modernist ferment and the political, social and aesthetic upheavals which attended it. Her poems are filled with the chafing and resisting of the pressure of old roles – especially those relating to women’s conventionally passive roles as wife, mother or muse – and the uncertainty of the new. This tension is evident in both the subject matter of the poetry and the styles in which they are written.

Reflecting the startling activity of the ‘New Woman,’ Wickham’s poems celebrate female desire and sexuality. The representation of sexual passion is quite graphically represented in poems such as ‘Surrender,’ serving to radically undermine nineteenth century notions of female passivity and compliance:

When you kiss me I am blind, My senses are filled with ecstasy … I am myself earthquake and eclipse

In ‘The Sculptor’s Hands,’ although the speaker positions herself seemingly  conventionally as the muse or art work of her sculptor-lover, there is also a strong sense of the primacy of her own desire, even though that is represented through metaphors of the divine. In many ways, the poem can be seen as giving Donne’s ‘Mistriss’ a voice to speak her own desires, inverting the voice of colonial domination:

Your hands on me work a transcendent pleasure, Myself becomes a universe, vast beyond measure … For a young neophyte within me stands Adoring at your beauty-working hands; And that strong skill so subjugates my mind, I am a leaf in love’s uprising wind.

Wickham was not afraid to explore darker emotions and experiences as well, breaking multiple taboos about women who are able to imagine themselves outside the confines of patriarchal marriage and into a field of action determined by their own will. In the poem, ‘Divorce’ she imagines that world outside the comforts of conformity as being both frightening and compelling – and maybe even as necessary to survival:

A voice from the dark is calling me. In the close house I nurse a fire. Out in the dark cold winds rush free To the rock heights of my desire. I smother in the house in the valley below. Let me out to the night, let me go let me go.

The motif of being smothered by the constraints of marriage and fixed gender roles reappears throughout her poetry, as in ‘Attempt at Analysis’:

Those who are wed Should love one another, Yet in the marriage bed, So many young loves smother. He does not love, who asks too strict control Of his poor yoke mate’s soul.

Escape from the cage of marriage however, does not prove to be simple, and Wickham’s pursuit of love, as it can be tracked across her poems, doesn’t lead to release and relief. For example, in the later poem ‘The Love-Tired Woman,’ her voice has become jaded and despondent:

So many gentlemen have kissed me I know the pressure of king hands and knees When they were gone they never missed me They found successors for their heart’s ease I am tired of love – tired of embraces Tired of men’s faces.

The motif of weariness appears to haunt the speaker, reflecting the undermining of her confidence. In the poem ‘I the most weary of all human-kind,’ this enervation appears to be linked to a failure to finally break free of the strait-jacket of conventional gender expectations:

I the most weary of all human-kind Have woman’s body scourged for liberty Broken for faith, bloody for victory – But a man’s spirit and an angel’s mind.

Sadly, for Wickham, there seems no way out of the struggles of ambivalence, expectation and the literal hardships of life as a woman writer; her poems increasingly reflect the prospect of death as the only possibility of relief. In ‘Reverie,’ she laments the harsh conditions of her life – struggles which she acknowledges to be emotional as well as physical and economic:

O my tormented soul. Snowing again and no coal. There is one hope for me – To sit for ages and write poetry. And now there’ll be no heated room. Come tomb -

In the poem ‘The Suicide,’ she is more explicit about seeking death – and prefiguring her own tragic death:

There is but one relief, for such as I; That is the point of time when I shall die. I trust to the caresses of this knife, To give me pleasure, long denied in life.

Although much of the content or ideas of Wickham’s poetry offer challenges to conventional roles for women – rather figuring them as writers, as active, as autonomous sexual actors – a key way in which Wickham’s oeuvre might be seen to cleave to the expectations of the past is through the use of conventional rhyming and metrical patterns in her poetry. In many ways this tension places Wickham at something of a crossroads as her work evidences a tendency to reproduce aspects of the poetic forms of the nineteenth century while at the same time explicitly looking ahead to new, modernist ways of thinking about voice, gender and agency. The extent to which these constraints of style in fact inhibit the radical potential of her ideas, is something for readers and scholars to debate. It does, in my opinion, reinforce what all artists know at some level – that the specific nature of an idea is inextricably connected with the manner in which it’s said; the transmission and reception of the idea is of a piece with the form which it takes. Wickham’s oeuvre is prolific, her voice passionate and often confronting and disturbing in a way which marks out an historical turning in ideas about women and the production of art. Her willingness to explore the vicissitudes of her own life and longings, both tormented and passionate, looks far ahead to the rawness of mid-century confessional poetry. However, caught within a style which sometimes deteriorates into an anachronistic sing-song of rhythm and rhyme, or overplays its hand with a declarative voice or an obviosity of image and intent, Wickham’s poetry struggles to move beyond being a marker of such historical and political significance and into being an art which is able to cohere concept and form – and thus able to engage a reader most effectively.

This thin, brave, little volume of enigmatic verse  apparently  about healing the broken nightingale  of Nature that has been ruined by destructive human ambitions,  actually has many subtexts such as the theme of loss and destruction which grimly predicts a deeper psychological and emotional derangement in nature-human relationships.Wordsworth’s nightingale, who according to the poet (had) "never known, / The weariness, the fever, and the fret  / … where men sit and hear each other groan", has been broken and needs fixing in the anthropocentric age. It’s a book that’s convenient to carry and worth re-reading many times to feel the pulse of shaken and broken times and even as a source of inspiration. The poet’s voice in the present collection is a call for spiritual evolvement, healing and compassion.

The question is not how to die but how to live How to link the  miracle in each moment to the next

(94)

Befitting the genre of ecopoetry many of the poems paint ominous pictures of this predicament in the future and give a warning. In “Natural Disasters” there is a clarion call:

Here it comes again -oh my God -the terror, like a hurricane out of nowhere, hauling out the roots of my trees, jagged-edging my sky, blowing my topsoil to who knows where.

(21)

However the destruction of nature is not an isolated phenomenon rather it is a corollary to the destruction and loss of human values.Allen aptly conveys in “The Disappearing Soul” the loss of faith with the same intensity as  Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach”:

 The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

In “The Disappearing Soul” the last line where the poet is sadly silent there is a re echoing of Arnold’s Sea and its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

I would like to find one thing which makes it clear that what was worthy and beautiful in us outweighed that which was hideous and amoral. That despite everything we somehow managed to tip the balance in favour of our kind-heartedness and compassion over our loathsome selfishness and bloody-minded hatred. Sadly, I am silent.

(103)

According to Jonathan Bates ecopoetry is about change and about presenting the experience of nature.[i]

The poet has worked out these premonitions and fears through an experimental and innovative style and formatting. Even the prologue, epilogue and divisions into sections are highly evocative. There is an order and intended cohesion of the different parts which leads the reader through destruction and disaster towards understanding and enlightenment as can be visualised from the Natural Disasters / Unanswered Questions / Occasional Truths / Flickering Enlightenment / A Scheme for Brightness. These are packed between a prologue and epilogue.

The prologue prompts the reader to engage with the poet in an embrace through eternal verse which may make it possible to outlive transient time. The verse itself is a cry to save nature while there is still time. “in the storm”  uses  visual expressions of art and even the title is in lower case to perhaps show humans as part of the storm of nature and human voices as insignificant as wind:

our voices the cry of the wind

(98)

“ Acts of Unfulfilled Love”  has been formatted in the style of a play, and there is a dramatic correspondence between sexual fantasies and the broken rhythms  of nature which create a sense of unfulfillment. In a soiled world love too appears to be corrupted, so the poet hopes for love in another world:

In another life you are the love of my life and in my other life I bid you welcome instead of farewell

(44)

Even though humanity is the oppressor and betrayer yet it has the potential for spiritual evolvement and healing as can be seen in “Armistice”:

Here I am darting like a bird like a fish in love like one of Noah’s doves from dry land, that leaps out of water

(93)

While death has been a much written about topic in poetry down the ages imbued with the sense of fear, romance, inevitability, surrender or sadness, Allen sees death as an obtrusion which he can put off.In “The Neighbour”  his encounter with death inspires hope and healing for the earth:

Suddenly I am not too young to have such drop-ins unannounced though I won’t let him stay long, not for now at least, not while I still have the strength to tell him to go home

(68)

Several poems in the section titled Flickering Enlightenment are about healing and spiritual seeking. In “Grace”

These suggestions Are everywhere Reminders that God Is not designed For us We are designed For God

(80-81)

Biblical and spiritual inspiration leads to the understanding of God’s signs that all creation is a vessel for God’s grace.

“Gone Fishin’” uses visual art to represent the intimate connection between the human unconscious and its nature oriented animal symbols.The poem is shaped like a lake in which: "The great, putrefying deep sea monster from our night sweats squatting in the heart of each of us."(85) The poem ironically hints at a deep connection between the rotting lake of the human unconscious and the looted drained world of nature. Yet the Sublime or God still remains for human beings to hold on to for hope and healing in “Chimera”:

the total data stream too dense to be assimilated like a kind of heavy water that must be

(95)

“Chimera” also uses visual art to show divine inspiration growing from a large expanse into a point of nothing. The point of nothing which stands for humanity makes the poem  Swedenborgian in intent.

In “Waterfall” visual art is used to show the soul slipping away from the material to the spiritual world of love like a flowing waterfall:

the cascading in slow motion waterfall of love

(108)

In “A Scheme for Brightness” the poet is “sitting on the edge of infinity” so

I must discover in myself With eyes closed From the four wild corners of the universe Something Which is of value to others That gleaming grain Of golden sand That piece of matter With the universe in it

(110)

In “The Secret language of Border Guards”  there is an attempted conversation between the secret mystical world of nature and humanity:

If our language were not a secret one we might share it with you

(86)

These lines delve deep into the human predicament of loss of faith and understanding of the link that is shared by man and nature.The border guards who will not let ignorant ones cross, are the creatures of natural sustenance and the rich unconscious. In the next poem “The Secret Language of those who wish to cross”:

Even if the roadblocks all come down and the checkpoints disappear, the road between us will never be open

(88)

They say intuitively that the road ‘between us’ will never open even if all barriers are removed. Allen seems to indicate that the inscrutable mysteries of nature can never be understood completely and humanity itself has created insurmountable barriers through its callousness and ignorance.

“Aubade” is perhaps the most beautiful and exquisite poem of this collection and hints at the loss of an artistic and beautiful world in a materialised technological age:

The only gold they ever knew was the music Of their imaginations, when, for a few brief unfathomable moments, they mistook the prison bars of their minds for the harpstrings of the heart

(100)

The poem appears to mourn the loss of freedom for poets who have to create poetry out of their intellectual bondage and barriers.

The epilogue sums up the purposefulness of poetry for change and its corresponding elusiveness:

I will wake up to poetry once more in a season aeons hence kicking at a glow in the embers to start one last fire against the chill of my days

(113)

It is a volume of verse worth reading and thinking over and a treasure of wisdom that one would want to go back to again and again. As in “The Optics of Relationship, or With this Poem I thee Wed” it raises some troubling, timeless questions too:

Who I was in the past, Who I will be in the future - What distractions these are From who I am now.

(59)

‘Think of the World’ is a collection of poems by John Leonard written on various occasions, on variety of subjects, but with a purpose of acknowledging the natural world or 'Nature' in general and the 'nature' of human beings in particular. The poems are from 1986 through 2016, a period of thirty years. The readers become aware of the change that happens to Nature through these years. As could be expected, the poems do not have a uniform structure or strict continuity, but the signature of the poet – writing not to please others – is on every poem. The poems are thoughtfully arranged and presented. The arrangement serves two purposes; the poems do not force themselves on the reader and they show the evolutionary path of the poet himself.

The poet takes the reader through the beauty of Nature and human destruction of Nature to a point of no repair. There is no hope for the future of Nature, there is no hope for the future of creations other than humankind, and there is no divine future for humans. This is all due to human actions alone and it is the bitter truth. The poet laments on and about it. Each time the poet presents Nature in all its glory, he makes sure that the reader observes the looming shadow of destruction tailing it. The poet makes sure that the reader realises this truth.

There are poems on a high philosophical plateau in the collection. They are thought provoking. These poems touch the reader nervously goading to think more deeply. The poem ‘Thought with’ concludes:

And yet thought is not, but only Thought with, thought with these things, And the countless others of this world – Rich, endless world, Yet world now ending for us… For thought has no being without.

(47)

The poem ‘How to Be?’, ends with the same philosophic question and an equally difficult answer, ‘Be.’ (104). The imagination of this short answer stops the readers to think for a longer time.

The poem ‘Errata’ is vigorous and sharp:

p.13 For ‘environment’, read ‘multi-sectoral resource allocation and arbitrage’;

(208)

It drags forward the tattered way of the world at present. Another poem that needs to be read between the lines is, ‘Consumer Demands’:

Some see this future, Some see that future, Some see no future.

(372)

The poem '97' reads:

In place of truth, traditions, in place of nature, uses.

(445)

and shows the way in which human society is giving fancy names and goals to each of its doings (mis-takes).

Apart from these philosophical poems, the poet has a way with the language and plays with the words. In the poem, ‘Which Demographic?’, he says;

These demographics are society, All actions build a common fate – Thas-and-thit, and grey, for all Your pitch. Which demographic Does this poem target?

(43)

The declining of species around us is powerfully said in ‘White-throated Needletails’:

They’re a part of our late summer, Here from far away in their winter; I’m keen to see them because They are fewer each year.

(49)

This is very true not just for white-throated needletails but, for all birds, animals, plants, trees, everything that belongs to Nature.

A poem that exposes the human frailty – of finding the ways and means to turn around all things in Nature, around us to our advantage and naming them for pleasure – is put nicely in the poem ‘The Names of a Hare’,

And now, good day Sir Hare, May God make it so That you come to me dead, Either with onion, or in bread.

(52)

The futility of ‘saving Nature now’ is expressed in ‘The Calendar Keeper’, repeating the same stanza for 2012, 2013, 2014. The beauty of the words is such that the reader can change the year for many generations and still retain the same wonderful words,

Great Destruction, The year in which humanity Wiped out so many creatures, So many forests and wetlands, So many grasslands and pastures, And continued to think it had A life apart from the world.

(54)

This is a fact till the end of the world. The poet continues,

I would not record these years Of shame, and the people would not Know where they stood In the current of time, as indeed They stand nowhere.

(55)

The poet writes satires on accountants, lawyers, law makers, reviewers, writers, publishers and yet they don’t read as satires. They are facts that writers (including poets) sometimes do not dare record in their writings. There are poems on human weaknesses; poems on the ways of the world, on society, and on living that draws attention to the nastiness surrounding our lives. In the poem, ‘The 1%’, the poet says:

They have crafted the world they wished, And it sucks – instead of great comfort (For themselves and their minions), all Is talk of climate change, resources Running out, geopolitical power shifts.

(60)

The poet captures the imperfection of human compassion in the poem, ‘On Death Row’:

Their laughter, singing, even Their conversation … it is as though Nothing has changed for them, As though they never heard the sentence.

(148)

This human attitude is true not just in such occasions but occurs in all spheres of life situation and in all walks of life. The projected truth is that humankind never learns to live. It is human failure to understand the rare truth that living is a complex learning! Living itself is an honour!

Think of the World has a brilliant collection of Nature poems. The poet admires and awfully respects all things in Nature. Birds, Rain, Spring, Autumn, Woods, creation and the like. The way of approach is different, for, the poet is not heaping praises and glorifying the unseen but squeezing the truth out of it and making the reader realise the truth. In the poem, ‘Absent Friends’ the poet says:

This is the end of all our wisdom, A world diminishing by the day, Birds and animals nearing extinction. … Let the time be what it may, If it has no room for these Then it is accursed, …

(26)

The hopelessness of the present situation is mirrored in the poem, ‘The Symphony of the Future’:

...                          will not Be written by a composer – none Could be that relentless, lack heart – But by order, business, growth.

(33)

The same is said in the poem, ‘The Dead Times’:

And you knew too how we were to live … a world without thought or trees.

(36)

The changing climate is well expressed in the poem, ‘A Second Spring’:

But this spring will not last The length of the first.

(150)

The poem 'Past, Present, Future' has same repetitive stanzas bringing out the unpromising state of Nature. (147)

‘In the Autumn of Our World’ shows ecology in its true light. The reader feels the darkness; the poem instills a sense of desperation; the poet saying with all conviction that the world around is beyond repair. The degradation of Nature from generation to generation is so much so that it is nearing its end:

Come the spring a new world Will open, but it will be strange, Nothing like ours, and we, We will not be here to see it.

(53)

A carnival of Nature poetry by John Leonard progresses thus from one poem to another, each revealing the truth, the bitter truth of hopelessness. The ultimate essence of his poetry can be seen in the poem, '17/11/15':

Very close now: the gap between Reality and our ideas is unbridgeable – Nothing can save us, so I, Sipping tea, fulfil my duties As a poet by not writing poems Such as ‘we can still do it’, or ‘Where we first went wrong’.

(30)

Nature poetry is the renewed literary movement of the present world. John Leonard has the sensibility, admirable clarity of vision about Nature, conviction in the bitter truth, and he is capable of distilling complex emotions yet infusing the truth all at once.

His journey has culminated in discovering his own poetic mode and creating a comfortable space in Nature poetry. Think of the World can do away with all the satires, grotesques like ‘Traitor’ (486), ‘Fragment of an Epigram’ (451) and still be complete.

From the perspective of ecopoetry, John Leonard’s contribution to English literature through his Nature poems is immense, because his expressive poems are thought provoking, rational, relevant and significant. He writes in his poem, ‘The Unsuccessful Writer’:

It was not that his writing was unskilled, Or lacking in interest, or unclear; If anything it was too matter-of-fact – Cold water, in an age of ginger-beer.

(337)

Leonard’s Nature poems are so honest, so matter-of-fact, and so bitter that it is like giving hot-boiling water, at noon, in summer, in a desert to a lone traveller who has walked days without any food! It is maddening but has to be accepted because it is true.

The reader closes the book to see the bird standing on one leg with its head buried in its back like his own thoughts.

Ready to Dance

What are we to make of Martin Langford’s Ground? It has been reviewed in other places, including many still freely available online periodicals, which cover the contents of the book in a more straightforward manner. In this review I want to focus on Langford’s historical framing – what it includes, what it excludes and what it makes possible. In this way, we can see that the poet is a type of historian. Rather than poetry as history or the poetry mapping change over time in form, style, voice, Langford uses the material of history as his major source of content. The evenness of how it reads the past is itself a choice, and though there are inflections of pop culture (Bert Newton) it is for the most part situated in a middle register of knowledge – the stuff of school text, of common sense, as opposed to deep archival research, arcane footnotes or mythic proportion. It does not seem like the work of a specialist then except when it comes to how it is expressed.

In the vocalisation of the poems, one is struck not only by the fairly consistent pagination but also by the recurrence of concerns and modes of speech. We are apprehending what ‘Australia’ is but the valences of that are subtle, probing, dispassionate rather than being embroiled in the Henry Reynolds/Keith Windschuttle paradigm. One knows that Langford is not only a skilled and able guide then, but approaches a feeling of objectivity when it comes to ‘the nation’. And yet, there is often slippage between the nation and pre-Federation with the periodisation being general rather than specific.

If one were to read Ground with an eye on the past however, one would know that ‘Australia’ does indeed have violence in its marrow, but Langford does not deal with this irrationally. Dispossession is a fact, an angry wound, yet the consistent flow and knowing generosity enable one to see through to what we might yet make here. It reads as profoundly empathetic and caring without collapsing into the more obvious camps of the History Wars. In 'To Say one is Australian’, Langford writes:

To say one is Australian is a simplification. They are endless, the varieties of country: porous position-dependent. Which ones did you mean? And elisions lead straight to power’s questions. Like What is the market? Or How can we outcome this scrub? They translate the earth to a field of abstractions we own – who gaze, plumped aloft, on a jet-stream of tropes at smoke and iridescence in the amethyst you cannot, ever, touch.

‘Australia’ it would see is that network of power distinct from country, land, earth, it abstracts the material base not only into language and dialogue (the questions) but also into ownership, gazes, and something you cannot touch. This specific use of country, as something not of the nation and with roots in an Indigenised perspective, finds a similar expression in ‘The Country Where Nobody Sings’ where Langford writes towards the poem’s ending:

Prose settles over our lives like a cloud of unbeing. We would make ourselves still for the fine print, and stare out at love ... Once there’d been tyrants in mills who’d admonished all singing. We do not need them: we govern ourselves.

This is not prose that settling device of nation, but country as some sort of imagined place, a big enough concept in which we can pour our hopes and dreaming. This allows not only a decolonising impetus that runs throughout Ground (if one knows how to read for it) but also a true republicanism that would not gloss where we are now. Langford seems to suggest, in the titular poem, that we might find this common ground, this polis, this hope, in ‘dancing’ or rather because this is written matter, in the poetic metaphor of dancing, somehow coming together as individual bodies in light of song. That is a hope I can believe in, and the corporeal poetry that is encouraged by Ground means that somehow we might all just get along, not as some naïve well wishers but as citizens cognisant of our past as the material of poetry and in our very bones.

This collection is a concatenation of loss: not just an assemblage but a linked chain in which each loss adds to the weight of the length of chain yet to come. The title poem shows the Herring Lass:

Not far from the stone harbour, herring kilns

pump wood smoke, smudged into an enterprise of masts

and the hemp rigging of a whole fleet, outward bound.

Her knife flashes in four-second strokes,

her wet hands never stray from a salted barrel

(11)

as she stands in mute drudgery while a whole living world moves and bustles around her. The cover (Winslow Homer’s ‘The Fisher Girl’) shows a woman standing in a fog on an indeterminate shore, looking out to sea for fish which may (or may not) appear this year (or next).

Losses in the natural world pile up, all at the hands of humans claiming to settle some sort of brave new world at the other end of the sad old world. ‘Day of a Seal, 1820’ begins as ‘[a] tall ship patrols the coast’ and the living seal hides in the ‘slaughter sands’ of Bass Strait. It ends as

Black women from the camps pile our skins on spits for tobacco, for oil.

…

I cannot strike back.

(22)

A hundred years later, in ‘Twofold Bay, 1930’ killer whale Old Tom is caught in 'sixty fathoms of double coir' as 'Norwegian guns cull the pods of hunted Orca spirits/ bathypelagic ancestors. I can taste the words whiten/ into thin milk of settler culture, …' (23). In Tasmania, the thylacine stands ‘The Vanishing’ on its head, disappearing the settlers themselves:

I’ll escape into ferneries, veils of Time

from the experts, bureaucrats, Lake

St Clair’s crags, from grotto to Sphinx,

jerking all the levers – till they

vanish from my world.

(26)

There are so many themes, so many layers in these poems that it’s impossible for me to find one obvious point of entry. So, I will jump arbitrarily to Cahill’s six-poem sequence of ‘The Grieving Sonnets’ and quote the fourth one in its entirety. It includes not only the losses to the natural world for the sake of money, but also the loss of words:

The river meanders from killing fields to half-light.

Never ceasing, nomadic running the scree. A lyric

festering, we ply her spirit with a destitute tongue.

Been fond of escape, been trading words for flight,

a bright skin of language, a second nature. Bring on

the sobriquets, take a few pills in the amber dawn.

I’m guessing the forecast is erratic, that dreaming

is my abode, but we have mansions for lovely forms.

We have harbour side galleries and Bindi Irwin.

Money jangles, and while it’s hard to get this straight,

I’d swear by the riotous retort of raven or wattlebird.

Hear the mulloway leap with a hoary splash to shoot

the silence and you understand the fanatic – oh fish,

our common antecedent, remind us of difference.

(44)

The poet’s abbreviated, telegraphic style reinforces our awareness of what has been ignored or cast aside in the trip from the killing fields to the safe dimness of half-light. The sonnet immediately preceding this one advertises 'Borderline poet with GSOH seeks discreet patois' (43). In the final sonnet, 'We feel the ignominy of territory, we chase idioms / borrowed from culture, memory, the past’s psychosis / and prison' (46).

The uselessness of language (which we fondly believed showed our superiority to the other animals) and the terrible track of destruction leave us with intolerable grief and shame, and no hope. We know only that we are far down the track of a process we ourselves began:

No tripping in the aleatory light, no thesaurus

for radioactive dusk with incurable ciphers. …

All that remains is the running brush, a train

and a whisper in the machine, half-wilting.

No figures of speech – nothing to speak of.

(‘After Fukushima’, 66)

Looked at from a different angle, loss can bring awareness of what might have been, what could have been. Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘Youth’ comes from the heart of Boys’ Own Tales of Empire: it follows a lad on a cosmically unseaworthy coaler taking coal from Newcastle to Bangkok, a nearly endless voyage in which everything possible goes wrong; the ship is saved only so that Marlowe can, years later, regale his worthy friends (retired mariners all) with the story of how his youthful spirit flourished amid it all – as his guests harumph in admiration, pass the bottle back and forth, and reflect that this is how Men are Made. It’s an story of mindless acceptance and takes place entirely on one level, in the grey, indeterminate world that surrounds one small ratty vessel. (Actually, not ratty: the rats leave early on in the piece, necessitating a whole new crew.)

Now look at ‘Youth, by Josephine Jayshree Conrady’ a glorious five-page narrative that brings life to a voyage geographically somewhat similar to Conrad’s, but one that revives and resuscitates the story by adding anecdotes and layers and a personality – as though the Technicolor has suddenly been switched on. J. J. Conrady asks and wonders:

Even as it recedes, why do I miss London?

Houses that reek of lime and coal smoke,

a crowded chaos spilling into Gravesend’s

noisy piers, stevedores, a jungle of wharves,

dock gates, Tilbury’s mastheads. …

I dressed in kurta with kersey breeches,

brass buttons, my hair clipped to the ears.

The sea beckoned, lingering

as in a dream, one does not wish to wake

from since it returns us to the cargo

of the drowned, unalterable past. …

(34)

There is travel, there is drama; above all, there are three dimensions and five senses making a wonderfully rich story – ultimately reflecting an immigrant’s sense first, of the confusion of new places and customs, and then of the fated, inevitable destination (which may not have been planned to begin with):

There’s only ever been one passage:

this deck I’ve paced, facing south.

…

Larrikins brawled with Arabs en route

to Melbourne. … English was a blank verse

that colonised our minds;

the full moon left us unbalanced.

…

Youth is intrepid of all mystery.

She plys a corridor to the Torres Straits …

All day the endless toil

of shovelling sand, pumping water,

a feat, like life itself. Or futile words –

Black. Arabian. Baltic, Ivory. Atlantic.

But through all the colour and headiness of human life, the loss awaits:

The sea is restless for her prize, the reefs patient.

Mercy we cry, each one of us

dreams of our poor carcass, swept asunder,

while in the harbour the hungry shipwrights wait.

(36-38)

This is a passionate book, full of grief and time travel, of keen observation of the world along with anger and shame for humanity. The poet’s voice is the voice of the Pythia at Delphi – not cryptic as some traditions have it but rather speaking from the very heart of the earth, original and powerful. The book is worth reading – and re-reading.

These poems talk of appearance and disappearance, the phases in between, and the fear uncertainty can bring about. The first poem, ‘Almost Pause / Pareidolia’, shows shapes we create to satisfy our own narrative:

Labile wonder, no rabbit-like fear, sea hares filling the tide pools with their magenta ink are flamenco dancers as much as mermaids were dugongs. All those sailors mistaking the docile monogamists for sirens …

and later in the same poem:

                                    Language hesitates to enter the concealed strand of vertebrae beneath a dark lick of scales, uncoiling across blackened remains of balga, racing as snake into our shared vision.  (14)

The snake is a  powerful image; it is lethal and beautiful, and we can’t look on it without both fear and fascination. Joy describes these in various ways. Her collection reads like an assembly of four chapbooks and, to my mind, the first and last sections in particular play most effectively with the snake image.

The first section quotes Ryoko Sekiguchi 'Even the mother tongue admits of speech / only by turning us around'.  The poems in this section deal with the mystery of flesh (including the physical world): where does it stop, where does it start, what does it really look like.

'Tiger Snake, Walpole' blends people, snake, light, temperature and grasses into one, ending (without benefit of language) with:

Darkly hollow as sky before moonrise. I don’t think we spoke Our innocent fear pairing us with the snakes unseen below us Their strange lungs pressed always to the earth    (27)

Lovers’ flesh melts and blends smoothly; light and sound come together; 'Snake Woman' and snake share the darkness:

No telepathy of scent, just two live creatures in a room not so much afraid of the task ahead more, the consideration. (36)

The poems vary in style and shape, but all have in common their place in an extraordinary landscape of amazing skies, endless space, familiar and named insects, trees, birds. Casual names for plants and animals mix with Linnaean names, the latter not italicised or capitalised (as though science were somehow different from nature). The words seem to sprout from the ground, like dragons’ teeth, and like the content of the first poems, are so tightly expressed that we become part of them. We feel the terror that ends 'Sea Krait, Broome' as though we ourselves are in mid-air, falling onto a pair of sea-snakes.

Later, we are given a variety of ekphrastic poems dealing with art works that deal with snakes: instead of the intertwined consciousness and flesh of the first poems, these snakes are doubly removed – our eyes seeing through artists’ eyes. But this doesn’t make the world any safer or the pythons any smaller, though it makes the linguistic register a bit more philosophical. Nor are appearances any more guaranteed, as in the 'Antidote Drawing: Rorschach Drawing of Correction Fluid and Antivenom, after Cornelia Parker':

Lick one, then the other, blanked layer Blistered mistake amended De formed like the start of a thaw Laidlines visible beneath each singular stipple remedy in whited closeness    (88)

The poem 'Lost Dog' is a chilling account of a brush fire, seeing a panicked snake spin figure-eights in its flight:

Between my boots in double bind a black snake, underbelly all aflame, winces and flickers an outline of lemniscates Pours over my foot and off the path    (112)

The 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans' ­– the mystery which both attracts and repels us – is many things. In 'I Dream of Walpole then Drive to New Norcia Still Tired', it could be the snake for which the poet vainly searches the paintings, even though she knew when she walked in that:

Thought leaves nothing to scale Language is its residue Tremendum as the bug Suddenly trapped under your eyelid Fished out in bits …  (104)

I had thought at first this was a book about snakes – but it’s more than that: it’s about what looking at snakes, talking about them, has to say about what really worries us – ineffable as that is.

Bull Days contains 58 sonnets – connected but entirely self-sufficient – that float through the book like prayer flags on a line. They are full of sound (and silence), motion (and stillness), of sky and air – moving through love in its welcome and its unwelcome manifestations.

The sound of your name, like the echo of birds, hovers in the honeyed space between eternity and this instant. I nest in arms too strong for this slight love, night floodlit by dying stars. The shimmering breath of Scheherazade floats across the contracting room, a charm to wear around the neck, like a spell, the crazy word that will keep you entranced, or not. I drink the wine of your kisses as if hemlock, the symphony of death plays its final tune­— before there’s nothing and afterwards the world fades with the sweetest call. Fragments survive, echoes of sound, but the exploding world must forget or perish.  (XXXVIII)

The wonderful range and variety of the poems’ content is matched by the variations on the sonnet form. A series of poems dealing with anger and regret leads up to one poem whose fourteen lines end with abrupt expletives:

All this politicking. It’s a sign. Yeah! Nothing in it if you’re single. Fuck! Thirty per cent of women live alone. Whoa! Let’s work out a way to tax silence. Cool! Sixty per cent of men roam the streets! Shit! …  (XVIII)

And then, on the facing page, a change of meter, vocabulary, and register:

Some nights I smell the sea the oyster smell of brine. The epic journey begins at the shore of the black sea. Into the deep seas of hell I pour the libations of sorrow. The pool of stagnant water at the edge of the world lies across three mountains I will never scale or see. … (XIX)

All but one of the sonnets here don’t rhyme; all but one have fourteen lines; most of them have turns; all of them feel like sonnets, though I would be hard put in some cases to say exactly why I say this. I read the book at one sitting the first time I picked it up, and in some ways it reads like an unbroken conversation, testing how far a poet can get and still keep the sonnet label. Given how robust this poetic form is, how long it has lasted and how hard it can be to pin down, I’m inclined to think there is an eidos of sonnets out there lending its (Platonic) form at intervals to hard-working poets, as and when it pleases. It has certainly given its approval here.

The images of sky, sea and space, reinforced by images of birds, carry us through the collection. In one sonnet we see a sequence of birds, balanced but in danger of falling:

A raven balances on bare branch, grips bare bough verdant with promise, bark, grown paper to touch, sheds strips. A helicopter hovers, stuns starlings to rooftop in fluttery flight.  …  (XLI)

And a few poems later, the sound of one gull brings sea, loneliness, injury, and recovery all together:

The gull’s plaintive cry, high-pitched, upset me above the din. To be frank, I felt unsympathetic when I cocked an ear. The gull had a monotonous weep. It knew only one note. What gall! I expected when the sea receded, the tide being far out this daybreak, its brother gulls, squalling over pickings, would be directors of my view. Instead, I saw a pelican amble ashore, one deep, dragged eye cocked towards eternity, but the wind picked up and gunmetal seas pounded the shore. I spun, dazed: Oh, to glide out of view like the wandering albatross.  (XLIV)

The sonnets reflect the varied voices that speak through a love affair, moving – always moving – through the poet’s memory and consciousness. She begins in (inhabited) space:

The astrophysics of our encounter, this dark energy of love, are unknown. In a singular moment the explosion that drove all things apart drove us too. … (I)

 Then,

I begin the long march in death’s dominion. I bear imperfectly the thought that I’m alone. … Once, I was beautiful but that was rapture. The tongue of love tastes tough in these bull days. (II)

Like a bull market, the affair is on the way up. The bullfight image comes up later in the book, first in the straightforward cut and thrust of the Spanish style ('I am your bull charging you', XX) and again in Sonnet XXII:

Kneel in the arena and pray I kill you.

Mouth a silent prayer when I charge you. Now greet me with the best manoeuvres, let your cape swing in the sun. I said pray. … I am a bull and must die. That is the point. (XXII)

The next poem redeems the bullfight, changing it into a question that suggests the many-layered ritual of Cretan bull dancers, rather than any insistence on death as the end / purpose of it all:

…                    What is the last image of you? A man pouring wine. You wore the bracelet of gold and lapis lazuli, like an invitation. In my cement backyard, a young artist painted the fresco of me bare-breasted. I search for your image in the disc before my eyes. It wasn’t some luscious youth I sought, his sensuous fringe like blond rivers of yearning. I wanted an elaborate dance of mind, pure spirit, and of a wish for the fall of your shadow. ….   (XXIII)

But we are left with both possibilities.

Another alternation is between sound and silence. The sonnet quoted at the beginning of this review is a return to sound, flanked by poems saying

I don’t mind your absence. I endure your loss. Where you travel there is only silence Bring out your lyre. Compose a song of praise. … (XXXVI)

and

Our bones and ashes carry the words that holy men, accustomed to love’s cancer, put to music or poetry when in temper. I gather-in the silence that haunts the seas.  (XL)

There are frequent flashes of blue between the moving prayer flags, reminding us that these poems are being read against the sky and the constantly breathing spirit that inspires love – both love as sky-blue heaven, and love as smouldering hell:

The eruption of this love turns blue. I saw the crescent moon turn blue. I saw the half-moon turn blue. I saw two blue moons in a month. All the moons I saw were blue. The plumes of ash from the eruption of your love rose to the top of the Earth’s hardwired body. And I saw the moon turn blue in shame. The ashes of your love bled into the red sunset I saw in Egypt. The fire in the forests of your love had smouldered for years. Blew up into the blaze the wind fanned from spite. The sun turned blue. In the smoke-filled sky the sun was indigo. The moon was blue again that evening.  (XVI)

This is a wonderful collection, a pleasure to read in all sorts of ways, whether or not you have a technical concern for the sonnet form, or whether you simply like to read really good poetry.

I have been drawn to Matthew Hall’s poetry by the critical rigour of his approach: he is also a first-rate theorist, and his study of violence in the work of J. H. Prynne is an exemplary account of what is at stake in the kind of experimental poetics of procedures which both he and Prynne employ. As Roman Jakobson says, all poetry can be considered ‘an act of organised violence committed on ordinary speech’, and the indeterminacies that arise from ‘cutting up’ received texts can be confronting in their violations of the reader’s expectations of conventional syntax and semantics. Yet the poems in this beautiful book do not seem a violation at all, but offer instead an act of extraordinary tenderness toward their source-texts – short stories of Canadian settler literature – and the vivid and often almost primal worlds they reveal. There are various critical frameworks which can be brought to bear on this, and the poem is supplemented with helpful prefatory materials: John Kinsella suggests the book’s ‘post-lyrical’ approach; that ambiguous term ‘pastoral’ is invoked; and Matthew aligns his work with Susan Howe’s manipulation of archival materials to re-evaluate historical sources. But this work seems to transcend the kind of poetics that those terms imply: in fact it is extraordinarily ‘lyrical’ if we take that word in its broader meaning; it engages with and invokes all kinds of traditional tropes about the natural world; and at the level of prosody it is doing things with language that are completely different from the approach one encounters in the poetry of Susan Howe (or of Olson before her). My own response to this book is really quite uncritical, and involves that completely instinctive sensation of the encounter with genuine poetry – similar to, for example, reading Bonnefoy for the first time, or Briggflats. And I say ‘genuine’ without any qualifications around the fact that this book is the result of careful collation from secondary sources – a method Matthew describes as being akin to ‘rope-braiding’ – because it seems obvious that all poetry is a process of the sculptural arrangement of given materials, and whether those are derived from personal experience or secondary accounts is irrelevant: in fact my feeling is that there is a great deal of ‘personal’ or lived emotional experience running through this apparently objective, ‘post-lyrical’ writing.

I was pleased to open the paper a few weeks ago to find Louis Nowra, that acknowledged expert on Australian poetry, complaining about how boring ‘nature poetry’ is. We can instinctively sympathise with what he means – one thinks of a kind of naïve poetry of straightforwardly mimetic description, perhaps evoking gum trees and cows in a misty early morning setting, or bathed in the 'purple noon’s transparent might'. And this description is typically directed by a Cartesian subject bringing their privileged consciousness to bear on passive objects, perhaps occasionally achieving transcendent moments in which they glimpse some intimation of the ‘thing-in-itself’ through the snares of Nature’s shifty realm of phenomenal appearances. But of course it is never as simple as that. If one were to take as an exemplary poet in this regard, for instance, Douglas Stewart’s attempt to seemingly enumerate every aspect of Australian flora and fauna (quite a service to our literature from someone born in New Zealand): these poems are by no means as artlessly imitative as they appear, and in fact all kinds of metaphoric and even metaphysical overtones (to do with Nietzschean will, or alchemical versions of Lindsayan vitalism) are being superimposed on the marsupials and varieties of orchid he describes. Beyond this, poetry is also and inevitably an entirely conventional art-form, so that writing poems about the natural world carries the weight of a history of tropes: when Virgil sits down to write his Eclogues in 40BCE, he is already working within an established conventionalised form (which will then lead him toward the equally established conventions of the didactic poem and the epic); the ‘pastoral’ follows this conventional trajectory from Daphnis and Chloe to Sidney’s Arcadia to Astrea and Celadon – and it should be noted that Matthew’s book can also be read as a ‘pastoral romance’ with its central male and female figures corresponding to those of the shepherd and his nymph. So that poems written about nature should be regarded as being no more naively expressive than, for example, those written within the conventions of love poetry – it would be like reading Ovid’s Art of Love as if that work were the simple expression of the poet’s personal feelings, and not someone brilliantly playing on rather worn-out themes. So the self-awareness of Matthew’s approach to the natural world, which consistently and conscientiously draws attention to the materials of its formal conventions, should be regarded as entirely typical. And indeed the politics of this kind of Brechtian self-awareness seems especially important in a world in which our approach to Nature is hedged by the fact that our governments are apparently being run by oil oligarchs. We also acknowledge that the technique of ‘cutting up’ literary conventions is a means of cutting through and exposing the subtextual or viral ruling assumptions of their language – though, as mentioned, this task is handled with the gentlest care and attention here.

Useful books such as Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature explain how we have inherited a Cartesian attitude that views Nature mechanistically as the instrument of our own supreme subjectivity – and we can regard certain approaches to poetry in this light. This builds on Platonistic or Christian views of the natural world as a fake realm of reflections, through which we can only ever see through a glass darkly. There is of course a counter-tradition to this perspective – to be found, for example, in Leibnitz’s idea of the monad as containing an intrinsic vitalising life-force; or in Spinozan materialism; or indeed in Schelling’s post-Kantian philosophy of nature (which Coleridge freely plundered for English Romanticism) – all of which seem to offer the possibility of a vital agency and equivalency to the natural world, which is no longer simply the instrument of human subjectivity. This is where the ecology of Matthew’s approach really comes into play, and is the point on which an ‘ecopoetics’ might be located. There is no monolithic organising subjectivity ruling over this poem. Instead there are three equivalent forces – the natural world, a male figure, and a female figure – each of which is granted equivalent vital agency, and each of which is equally mediated through the language which has been selected for their presentation.

Let’s now look at that language, those carefully selected and braided words, in a little more detail, to see how customary hierarchizing distinctions between subject and object are dissolved in Matthew’s poem. We can begin with sound as it is structured through the resonances of longer passages offset by shorter sections; here are the four longer sections from pages 20-21 with my own tentative caesura breaks:

The salve of rain on desiccated fields. | The weather clawing at his mouth, | nests in the deeper stones of her body. Lit upon stone piles, the wreck of wild grasses; | fescue, sedge, | roots clutched in soft restraint. Den in the morning, | her lingering trace over the slope of his back, | fleet, day mouthing on the sill. Her shadow mantled over the swollen planks of the floor, | shoulders caped | with the laboured song of his breathing.

The cadences of those sentences are very carefully balanced and directly recall the regularity of rhythms in Beckett’s later prose – they measure our reception, imposing an equanimity that subsumes both the human and the natural within an evenly sustained prosodic frame. This is supported by an exactly precise attention to image: as Kinsella sensibly notes, ‘linguistically, there is slippage, but the image is concrete’. In fact the approach is thoroughly Poundian: take this establishing line from the opening section, ‘His fledgling lamplight, leaves in each scavenging direction’ – this is Imagism in the manner of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, a two-image relational haiku encapsulating the concept of pioneering settlement.  The natural object is always the adequate symbol: the precision of the image is its own proof, requiring no ‘statement’ or authorial intrusion; everything is therefore equivalently impersonalised. With the usual indicators subsumed in this manner at the level of both sound and image, the reader is forced to examine the materials of language in themselves for thematic guidance – so in pages 20-21 we find patterns of establishing recurrence: ‘the salve of rain’ matched by ‘the compress of rain’; ‘weather clawing at his mouth’ – ‘hands folded in weather’; ‘the deeper stones of her body’ – ‘lit upon stone piles’; ‘troops branching caul’, ‘her shadow mantled’, ‘shoulders caped’ (my italics). And note how these recurrences fluidly map coincidences between human experience and natural forces – as if everything is in vitalistic correspondence. Listen to the precision with which words are chosen: ‘inexorable day / harrowed leaves / rusting in purgation / tannins consonant in rivulets / descant in the tethered shade’ (p.33). ‘Descant’ is of course Basil Bunting’s word, and there is a similar attention to the sounded syllable in evidence here. Observe the following description of a wildfire, as revealed in two remarkable sentences: ‘It caught like a windrift, incendiary over the cleft and fieldbreak, thrown metal in dry swords, broke away and burnished in uneven wreaths’ – then the aftermath: ‘Wishbones drying on the windowsill, smoked distance’ (pp.48-49).

The key word from the passage quoted above is ‘consonant’, a repeated term often framed against the word ‘estrangement’ – the settlers seek ‘consonance’, both in marriage and in their compact with a natural world from which they are always inevitable estranged. This leads us to the poem’s title, with its obvious associations of a postlapsarian separation from Nature and divine origin: this is explicitly stated on p.47, ‘the thankless / tasks / of false fruits’, reminding us that rural labour and the cultivation of nature are a direct punishment for the sinful consumption of ‘false fruits’. This is announced in the poem’s opening line – ‘Swollen fruits primed with tender flood, perfume stoked with decay’ – in which every word is loaded with religious overtones, ‘primed’-‘flood’-‘decay’. Later we hear, ‘Beyond the ravine, a dark world pulses through lapsed cathedrals’ (p.33). As I read the book this search for consonance seems mainly the task of the female figure who is usually framed against an interior or private space: ‘Porch doors announce you, letting drop the laboured clothes, riveted hands under terminal water’ (p.3). We hear of: ‘Her pledge to each bough, each swarming animal. Jarred fruits above the pressed earth of the cellar’ (p.15); she is ‘The wife of fallowed wing, the husband she is by consonant feather’ (p.17). Later we find her engaged in a musicalising labour for redemption that might also reflect the harmonising task of the poet: ‘Perched in a garment of rain, her limbs foraging for music. // penitential / hymns / the long road to service’ (p.42). This culminates in her conception of a child, after ‘The marsh of breath turns regal, her song is the wide bright field of his splinted joy’. We encounter ‘a crib of expectations’ against which she appears ‘beautiful in a warm camisole, bone buttons hobbled with thread’ (p.60). And what follows from this is some of the most touchingly precise imagery of early parenthood that you could read. I note that Matthew has dedicated this book to his own young child - and I apologise for having imposed such a narrative, and indeed possibly autobiographical, interpretation on what is purportedly a ‘post-lyrical’ book. But that is a result of the emotional force that the book delivers; and also of the fact that genuine poems always exceed the critical frameworks imposed on them.

Flaneur, you’ve made me dream of Lisboa, as if I had roamed its streets with nostalgia, becoming the dramatist or the character of a book in progress. (2)

From the very first story in Letter to Pessoa, Michelle Cahill sets us up for a journey through shape-shifting fragmentation, and the emergence and dissolution of identity, in a world of sharp light and shadow. Protagonists are half-awake, half-sleeping in crepuscular dawn or in the dazzling light of Iberia, or of Sydney with its blooming jacarandas. Voices, finely word-shaped in the writer’s poetic crucible resonate as the heteronym becomes flesh: ‘All that we have are fragments of the mirror. Not cold or sharp in their edges but precise and dazzling when the light sweeps back into them and we seek outside of time’ (4).  In Letter to Derrida, writing floats as fragment and trace, between loss and ecstasy, between tragedy, violence and suffering’s trusty residue, humour. As a collection, Letter to Pessoa can be read as a discourse on shifting realities, parallel and otherwise. As the narrator of Borges and I observes ‘it was alarming to consider that reality was little more than a palimpsest …’ (124-5).

The heteronymic mode works successfully as a link between the narrators, who vary in character and experience, but connect through Cahill’s evocation of place and situation. As a rule, protagonists are at a loss, coming to some kind of understanding in worlds of half-light or dream (Dirty Ink). They experience journeys in search of the spiritual (The Sadhu), or the circumstances of marginalised drifters or criminals (Letter to Neil Young), or betrayal in the sharp light of day (Duende). Throughout, flowers are the vehicle for the expression of the intensity of emotion, as they reflect and absorb conflicting, contorting feeling. Such a trope reaches its apogee in The Flower Thief, which features one of Cahill’s endearingly demented narrators:

I love the snapping sound when the leathery foliage breaks between fingers leaking sticky sap … I’ve come to think of myself as a flower thief, a nocturnal stalker, a dawn raider. Our Lady of the Red Japonica … Never one to waste a petal, I’ve drunk dandelions, candied violets and sugared roses. I’ve pickled lavenders, tossed them with nasturtiums. I’ve foraged from urban precincts: council parks, the garden beds of churches, roundabouts, the communal grounds of units and apartments. (168)

At the end of this story, after such entrancing interludes of onomatopoeia, the mood becomes elegiac, a momentary dissolution:

Once, by moonlight, I left a hundred petals at my lover’s gate. The wind scattered them. They were swept from pavement to gutter, from gutter to bitumen. They were crushed into little pieces that ricocheted skywards or became jammed in the tread of tyres on some nihilistic course. (173)

The first story in the collection, Letter to Pessoa, sets the tone for the preoccupations of the book as a whole: a sense of place, shifting realities, references to the addressee weaving in and out of the narrative. The protagonist has just woken up, and finds a note from Aleandro, last night’s pick-up:

On the desk next to your Selected Poems, there’s a note, saying ‘Thanks’ with no address. Not even a number. It’s so humid my wristwatch could be melting as in Dali’s famed masterpiece but the dream is my own and the mattress is hard against my back. (1)

He makes his way through a city of bars, a sensual, over-stimulated environment lit by a sky which ‘crushes me with its vivid blue’. The floating world of the city both consumes the narrator and leaves him open to multi-faceted apprehension of the mysteries of identity: ‘I wonder if [the poems of Alvaro de Campos] were fabrications or if he lived in you?’ (2-3).

In like vein, the prize-winning Duende captures Iberian light within its fabric, as it constructs a powerful evocation of ‘the terror of evaporating love’. A couple of sentences hint at the impending betrayal, as when Miguel says to Julio, ‘I’m going to Sevilla this weekend for the corrida. It’s going to be crowded. You could stay here and write?’ (45). Later on, when they are both in Sevilla, Miguel says, ‘Why don’t I meet you in town later?’ They arrange a time and a place. (46). There is a fragility of detail in the writing as if observed under panic: ‘All afternoon Julio is fidgety … A scent of jasmine wafts in from the garden of a nearby home and there’s a strong smell of pork meat’ (46). Imminent break-up embodied in sensory overload setting up a tragic denouement; he is compelled to write:

There’s a café by the river bank in Arenal where he orders wine and starts to write. For the first time in months the poems bleed. They spill from his pen to the paper almost monotonously … Miguel calls twice. But Julio keeps writing and doesn’t answer the phone. He sends a text that he’ll skip dinner … the drought has broken into a thick rain. (51)

The deep pathos of Duende has its echoes in other parts of the collection, but themes explored through place, the senses and the vicissitudes of love can appear in other modes, as in the often hilarious Dirty Ink. Here, the image of the lover seems to shift and change, drifting like a series of pixilated images on a screen. As in Duende, the erotics of the text rest on a single line of suggestive syntax from a text message, ‘I may be passing through the city but I wouldn’t be in a rush … She adores his grammar … There was so much syntax to quell, the soul in spasm!’ Filming a video on her iPhone ‘as she crawled over the rug’, next day ‘when she bumped into the neighbours at the letterbox they seemed to be rolling their eyes’ (22). In similar mode in The Lucid Krishna, a psychoanalyst is ‘lying on a futon in a silo apartment in Newtown. Just before the airport curfew ends she passes into REM, transported from the simmering November light’ (31). Once again, here is a protagonist wafting between dream worlds, refracting out of a blurry presence/present, ‘sweating in that strange continent of sleep, her dream-self aroused’ (34). Here, the dream lover is a ‘re-programmed’ Krishna, who is at once a driver whose ‘face resembles a rain cloud, his dark hair lustrous as peacock feathers (31), and ‘a ripped dairy hand from the Darling Downs in southern Queensland … [with] … a weakness for ghee’ (32), who has a strong resemblance to ‘the guy in the elevator talking all the way up to the 23^rd floor’ (35). The dream tryst ends at day break as ‘day birds croon their urban memos. The first aircraft crosses the flightpath above her silo’ (36).

Between major works such as Letter to Coetzee with its interrogation of the text by a fictional character, to Borges and I with its exploration of shifting realities (‘slanted are the reflections of history’s shifting mirrors’ (126), are stories of travel to centres of the spiritual in Nepal and Thailand. These stories in some cases represent a counter-narrative, the annihilation of freedom, as in the young Italian girl imprisoned in a house with a charismatic guru in Sadhu, or the tragic case of the misplaced Rohingya refugee in Finding the Buddha, whose experience contrasts with that of the sensory preoccupations of the narrator, who ‘moved from the inner world of meditation, my perceptions heightened. There was something desolate yet consoling about the night’s inchoate shadow, cast by facades of the stupa, the vihara, the sala’ (113). Azima had not come to the temple to meditate, but ‘was an orphan with nothing but the jungle swamplands between countries to call home’ (116). Other stories like Disappearing introduce the scathing voice of a narrator triumphantly celebrating his lack of empathy, particularly for women.  This voice has quite some similarity to the voice of the sociopathic husband in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

Two other major pieces, Letter to Virginia Woolf and Letter to Tadeusz Rozewicz, address issues which appear to have personal significance for the writing life of the author. In Letter to Virginia Woolf, one preoccupation is how the memory of garden and place can signify loss: ‘I’ll always miss the house with its cool hearths, the timber verandah, the old cherry blossom tree, the bones of our cat and our terrier buried beneath the maple and the flaky, termite-ridden jacaranda’ (29). In Letter to Tadeusz Rozewicz, the narrator, after travel to Poland and suffering jetlag (‘when I sleep it is in a 4 hour cycle’, 221) and overwhelmed by seasonal change, notes that ‘The light in my room is too bright … Sydney summer is harsh’ (224). With the sorrows of the trip, and being exposed to the particular tragedies of history, comes a personal awareness of trauma, and of how memory can trigger a sense of a before and after image of violence, as when ‘how during my walks I would step to inhale the perfume of billowing magnolias’ (226).

This beautiful and compelling collection owes its strength to the gifted hand of the poet in the crafting of its sentences, and in the depth of its observations. As Cahill puts it in Letter to Tadeusz Rozewicz, writing ‘cannot be separated from dreaming, even dreams that are steered through hallucinatory images, post-flight mirage’ (230), and in writing of love, the migratory, home and heartbreaking loss, Letter to Pessoa speaks to who we are.

Stuart Cooke ends his second collection Opera, with a list acknowledging specific 'places as integral to the poems' (87). These poems he states were written by a compositional process involving 'following, and responding to, the creative suggestions of … surroundings' (87). Threaded throughout the collection are photos of these places, highlighting the limitations of the purely linguistic and establishing another layer of collage, the primary mode by which Opera works. Opera opens in Sydney with the title poem and travels, circuitously, out from it. It begins with return:

After each voyage has crumbled into ephemera,

I return to the house

and its quay, I circle the edge ...

('Opera', 9)

and ends with a similar push-pull, between urges to leave and to stay:

it’s the time towards which

we tumble inexorably,

away from which we surge, searching.

('Opera', 10)

This is one of many poems in the book using this type of propulsive linguistic fragmentation, where each line follows the next at imprecise angles guided as much by sound as by semantics.

Opera could be enjoyed purely for it’s own linguistic virtuosity; however, as Cooke is one our more exciting writers on poetry, it is worthwhile considering his poetry in light of his own critical aims. Particularly relevant (and cited by Pierre Joris in his blurb for Opera) is the concept of a ‘nomadic poetics’. In a 2011 article, 'Echo-Coherence: Moving on from Dwelling' Cooke uses the nomadology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari to develop an ecopoetics that emphasises movement between places as a way of stressing the myriad connections between places:

a nomadic poetics of Australian places, or a light‐footed travel across them, with an ever‐present readiness to move on should certain situations demand our departure, can offer some promising alternatives for the ways in which we relate to, write about and manage contested and climactically variable locales (230).

This is proposed as an alternative to a settler Australian, or wider western, poetics which values dwelling, localism or a connection of a particular individual to a specific place. He quotes Deleuze and Guattari that 'the life of the nomad is the intermezzo', so the title of Opera morphs again alluding to this middle space of nomads .

It is fitting then, that the poems in Opera travel between places—mostly Chile and Australia—and between languages, Spanish and English. In 'Drift', translation and movement link language to site:

Stride is true                          country           wollemis

wollemis arrested                 abstractly       stride

during a date’s different      descents         descend

and the plight of a                cerro               cerrados

Becoming Hispanic or

sucking a tune’s blushing

i.e. stride was native

… peninsular                 en un peninsular’s thumb                        gordo ground                       rojo

('Drift', 42–43)

The shifts between place and language are collagic, layered so one does not supplant the other but grows over and around it like a layer of bark. This is not a simple, and potentially clichéd, metaphor of trees but one that seems particularly relevant to what Cooke is attempting in 'Drift'. In an article in Meanjin examining the various intersections between Chile and Australia through the primary lens of the genus Araucaria, Cooke threads through questions of poetics or 'the problem of form, and who sees it … when is a line no longer a line, but the leaning trunk of a tree, of a pine?' ('Echoes of Gondwana'). In 'Drift' the spread of the Araucaria is connected to shifts in language, the columnar structure of the poem guided by tree trunks, land masses, but also footsteps, striding.

Cooke’s interest in translation and transcultural poetics is paired with this sense of the nomadic in poems stemming from his work with Indigenous Australian and Chilean poets. In his work on the Mapuche poet Leonel Lienlaf, Cooke links Mapuche oral songpoetry to Stephen Muecke’s reflections on Aboriginal songpoetry, stating that both have a

prominent sense…. that the stanzas could be repeated, like the stanzas of a song, in order for the white space to be more properly filled ('What’s an Ecologically Sensitive Poetics', 96).

This lends itself to the plurality of voices that characterises song poetry, the poem continuing like a song in the round. As Cooke notes on the nulu songs sung by Nyikina man Butcher Joe Nangan in 'Orpheus in the New World', the 'emphasis on any particular subject’s response to the world is in turn dispersed across multiple subjectivities. … A new emphasis might be found on the exchange between bodies, on the tracking, rather than on a particular body' (145). Cooke’s aim for a nomadic poetics becomes an aim for a decolonised ecopoetics, one that emphasises communality.

'Song of the Possible' draws off both traditions of oral song poetry, offering a song of Sydney that through extensive repetition and patterning seems like it could continue beyond the frame of the page and poem:

He might fish from a jetty the size of a thumb, apricot and ebony smeared across the waves’ slick backs

the long waves rolling in from far off

long snakes rolling one after the other

                 

long black snakes rolling in to shore

black snakes rolling over pavements

 

their inky lines over pavements

the inky lines on their parchment ...

('Song of the Possible', 11)

As a song of Sydney, this is an urban song despite images of fishing and ocean. Cooke has written of Val Plumwood’s concept of 'shadow places' which 'provide our material and ecological support, most of which, in a global market are likely to elude our knowledge and responsibility' ('Echo-Coherence', 236). In 'Song of the Possible' the images of snakes, so resonant in Indigenous cosmology, are fused with these shadow places of industry so we encounter 'the quietly moving coal serpents', 'their husky voices of diesel and desert', 'their diesel mouths assembling at the sailing house' ('Song of the Possible', 11). It’s curious to encounter industry through the lens of lyrical song. These shadow places of refuse and waste reappear throughout Opera, reminders that there is no such thing as a pristine ecology, as in 'Double Shudder' where:

Despite their buildings’ calcified retinas, despite the torrents del concreto buckling with refuse, today the sea spins the same line: suck my fat sun, gobbling down celestial

('Double Shudder', 29).

Sometimes these shadow places are purely human environments. Cooke’s more satirical poems such as 'stratosphere song' and 'An American Family Plays Frisbee at the Beach while on Holiday in Chile' (after Pablo de Rokha), are interested in unpacking how people interact with constructed, colonised, environments. 'stratosphere song' takes us to Las Vegas:

women verging

on  pretty what we lose

focus: what we lose thrives

on waste capital piles

up / hotels spanking roads

the hoary tolls aching

for credit capital p

('stratosphere song', 24)

Here the tight hard alliterative lines jangle like coins spilling from the mouth of a slot machine. 'An American Family Plays Frisbee at the Beach while on Holiday in Chile' has a similar rhythm but a very different form, relying on repetition and typographic effects to create a sense of claustrophic irony out of an average tourist situation:

Americans at THE beach, Americans playing frisbee, adolescent Americans chasing Frisbees thrown by their parents, good, Christian AMERICANS, family Americans, communicating well, relishing exercise, chasing THINGS

('An American Family Plays Frisbee at the Beach while on Holiday in Chile', 23)

In these two poems alone, we see an example of how wide ranging Cooke’s formal eco-aesthetic is. In Opera poems shift between those such as 'Opera' which tend towards a more lyrical mode, to those such as 'Lurujarri: a poem by foot' (discussed below) which are formally experimental.

Despite—or perhaps because of—an emphasis on movement, and the wide success of Cooke’s translations of his poetic theory into poetic action, some of the poems which stick in the mind are the ones where the singular poetic subject is stationary and perceptible as more than a shadow among the shadows of trees. 'An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World' is a study in homesickness, with all the particularity that the word home carries, 'perhaps the things I miss the most: // laps at Clovelly on warm afternoons; decent / Chinese food; the sport on TV …' (61). And in 'Particle', part of the longer 'Cantos de despedida' (Songs of Farewell) sequence, elliptical statements of landscape: the shapes / of the syntheses / emerge from air’s wriggling, / chopping beam’ are paired with lines to a lost beloved: 'just this being towards / here without you’, ‘I could never hone in on the simple like you’, ‘You looked at things as if they were letting you be' (78). Here we glimpse the individual absent from the majority of Opera which eschews the lyrical ‘I’ for more collective voices.

There is a sense across the collection, of each poem, each word having been weighed in what is could be called a poethical way. Here I refer to Joan Retallack writing that, among other things, poethical is 'approaching what is radically unknowable prior to the poetic project, acting in an interrogative mode that attempts to invite extra-textual experience into the poetics somehow on its terms, terms other than those dictated by egoistic desires. ... The poet as persona is largely absent from the poem while the investigative passion of the poet informs every syllable' (39). The pieces of individual subjectivity offered in Opera are embedded deeply into cacophony of place, animal, plant, and person. Words like mesh and web are overused and imprecise in ecological criticism, and do not conjure the type of embeddedness that Cooke offers. His is not a holism, instead as in 'Lurujarri: a poem by foot', the most experimentally ambitious sequence in Opera, we are only shown some connections

we’re scattered by accident

/                   /                  \   /        \

tent         <         >                  (sight)   <cuckool>

/                       \             /

\                       cushing — hot totem

— tell me                /               /                            /

\                    /        granular — bloodwood hum

('Lurujarri: a poem by foot (sixth)', 51)

Here like a torch moving across the wires of a substation in darkness, we see only some things but are aware that, even if it is beyond our sight or knowledge, what we can see must be connected to what we can’t.  And that beyond that lie necessary dark spaces.

Often a poet, even a great one, fails to live up to his own criticism, sometimes like Coleridge falling out of love with writing poetry because of it.  One suspects that Cooke does not aim to be a ‘capital-G’ Great poet, that such an aim would be outside of the communal ecological ethos his criticism, and poetry, seeks. The question then becomes how does Cooke succeed, not in rising above as a singular poetic voice but in threading linguistically among the multi-faceted ways place connects to person connects to other-than-human connects to place. Success, again, is perhaps the wrong word for the accomplishments of Opera. In Opera parts of the world appear, and as readers we are placed amongst them as Cooke’s music teaches us how we might sing and move as one of a chorus.

Landscape with Memory

It could have been in Goroke or Seymour when I sat with a friend in a field. We were speaking of authors and what it means to write of the "Australian" landscape as a type of vision of the world. This was not literature in the Tom Roberts or Frederick McCubbin mode of apprehension, but something different, something less impressionistic and more precise, something less painterly. When we spoke we spoke of an author who went by the name of "Gerald Murnane" and I told my friend what I knew then. I said that for the duration of my undergraduate degree I had a correspondence with him as far as I know. He was very generous and I used to write letters to him with questions about writing and how to be a writer, and he would write back with suggestions and anecdotes. For the most part, we wrote to each other about literature but it also coincided with his wife’s cancer and her eventual death. As much as we wrote about literature we were also writing about life itself.

So much critique of Murnane focuses on his life rather than his work, highlighting somehow that he is an eccentric figure, a curious man who nevertheless writes good books. I met Murnane in person many years later at the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards when he was there to collect a prize for his memoir Something for the Pain and I was there with the Small Press Network. That evening I introduced myself and we spoke about how we had stopped writing to each other, but the main part of our conversation was concerned with horse racing because of my partner’s family connection. Murnane, it must be said, did not come across as eccentric but rather a normal bloke who just wanted to have a beer and a chat amidst a red wine drinking latte set. The idea of Murnane as odd has surely come about because of his work, not because of anything he himself is. So what are we to make of his work? And what are we to make of it when we read it now, re-contextualised through the aging process?

Landscape With Landscape was first published in 1985 and in this updated edition, Murnane comments on how it was "brutally treated" in its early days and also states that he has "never engaged in public or private with any reviewer and I’m not about to do so now". Unfortunately though, Murnane and I had an epistolary relationship that bifurcates Landscape With Landscape in these two treatments (1985 and 2016) so he can never say never again. Reading this work for me was like returning to something I used to hold dear and in that way it was a curious experience, like writing a book about a book about a film that is never made, or like an author who writes about authors who are doppelgangers of themselves in some way. It was a memory of my own time filtering through what is a memorial to an Australia that might have been anachronistic in its own time.

The reader will note now that the book is a book of 6 chapters, each being short stories. They discuss life in the suburbs, city and country of a place that resembles "Australia" (and one story that is oriented around Paraguay), and one could project concerns about gender, status and art though they are most decidedly concerned with language. They are observational, attentively so and from a decentred first person perspective, but one is also struck by the racial unconsciousness that exists here – characters are never identified in such a way that one could assume they were anything other than hegemonic. This fits with the poetry Murnane sent to me after we re-connected at the Premiers Awards, including a poem that was Jindyworobak at best. When I wrote back and said I had some reservations about the representations of Aboriginal culture, I never heard from him again. He is a symptom of an earlier Australia, one that is earlier even than his own time. This is landscape with landscape, not landscape with Wiradjuri, Koori, Yolgnu.

When I heard Gerald speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival, his interlocutor was embarrassingly in awe of him, positively stupefied by the stature of the man. And yet, writers are simply writers, minor celebrities at the best of times no matter who they are. The audience was composed of serious young white men, the kind of university students who read continental philosophy and pontificate. That is Murnane’s bloc, who he appeals to, or rather, they seemed like the reader I once was, the reader who thinks they get him at some important and critical level as they sit in the field to speak of literature in the here and now. And yet, away from the metropolitan centre that Melbourne attempts to imitate, Murnane resonates with those who can take pleasure in the abstract delights of language itself rather than divine clarity, message and meaning alone. In that way, he has concordance with "difficult" poetry (something he abhors, preferring tightly structured rhyming lyric that is conservative) rather than prose, and that is the vein in which I have read Landscape with Landscape this time around. The pleasure with Landscape with Landscape is with the attention to the sentence as if that were the line, but not the word. There are ideas here but it is not conceptual, and the tropes of self-referentiality suggest a world albeit not of an ironic persuasion. It is earnest and suggestive while also being signposted and palpable.

It is less that Murnane is exemplary, though he certainly is, which has been fairly remarked upon. Rather, it is that, for this reader, Murnane connects to a world of poetry, and which distinguishes his work structurally and thoughtfully from say Hannah Kent, Tim Winton, Kate Grenville. That is what makes him "literary" if not philosophical, and that might be why he remains so vital to Australian culture in a post-pastoral world. And yet one cannot help but discern a politics that is neither "correct" nor ecological in the sense of being connected and holistic. That should simply be more reason to read, and critique, him more closely still