We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 108
AUTUMN 2007
REVIEWS
Poetry Survey
Rebecca Edwards
BILLY JONES - WREN LINES: SELECTED POEMS AND DRAWINGS, VOLUME 1 SOI 3 MODERN POETS, 2006
This is a handsome collection of Jones’s poetry and drawings, faithfully chronicled in diaries between 1975 and 2006. Unfortunately, from the first poem - ironically titled ‘True Art’ - a weakness is revealed which runs throughout the book: a lack of commitment to the craft of poetry. ‘(P)aint yourself a picture/ lose yourself in discovery/ find yourself in bliss’ - this is not a strong set of opening lines. Neither the poems nor the insights they deliver on life, art and humanity show much development from the seventies to the twenty-first century. This aside, there is much that is charming in Jones’s account of an enviable lifestyle: ‘I bake my own bread/ grow what I can/ lie around a lot in the forest doing nothing’; and in his intimate observation of the North Queensland rainforest: ‘spoonbills wading where/ I cross the billabong/ ankle-deep Milky Way ripples’ (‘The Spirit of the River’). Delicious pen and ink drawings of domestic objects (taps, knickers fallen to the floor), wildlife and plants achieve a freshness of line that many of the poems lack.
In a certain mood readers will groove along with Jones’ dreamy introspection: ‘I get drunk/ on Mu tea/ apples and cunt’ (‘Mu Tea’), but I wanted something more: a toughness of image, a poetic rigour, a willingness to make the leap from self to other, which rarely happens in this collection.
LUKE BEESLEY - LEMON SHARK SOI 3 MODERN POETS, 2006
Gently surreal, these poems will delight some with their playfulness, and frustrate others. Look elsewhere for meaty, savage imagery or commentary on the state of the nation: most of the poems in this collection are delicate love poems captured in fleeting moments: lips at cigarettes, raindrops. There is a tendency towards preciousness: ‘Today I learnt Motion has a son named Luke,/ and as I found it in the piece, the delicate please// of L on the tongue how it anchored the poem./ Surprising the pleasure, I admit to the strange pleasure’ (‘After the Ash Tree’).
Much stronger is the prose poem ‘Spillway’: ‘Oh you lose so beautifully she said and threw me down on the/ slope. The lawn took my back with a sting and she fell into my/ mouth...’. The self-consciousness of lines such as ‘Mt Crosby, 1 am/ Four poems begin’ (‘Spring’) or ‘quick autumn like a strip or a noun a/ strong name Luke Mark O’clock...’ (‘Red and White’) is far less appealing.
Lemon Shark left me fighting for breath, its focus claustrophobic and narcissistic, its rhythms prosaic, conversational, slack. Beesley’s poetry is yet to step out of the smoky coffee shop/bedroom into the wide fierce world.
JANE WILLIAMS – THE LAST TOURIST FIVE ISLANDS PRESS, 2006
This is a poet with a generous scope. Her best poems are direct, cleanly and strongly executed, and display a willingness to engage with humanity. Metaphors could be stronger and more original, however, and there is little variation in voice. Take ‘Inventing a God’: ‘If I could invent any god for you/ it would be the brave god// who would never tire/ of kissing your blind spots// who would send her own ghosts on ahead/ to light the way.’
‘While you wait’, a tender, sharply observant poem, begins: ‘while you wait/ remember forgotten things/ your mother pouring cream/ into an empty jar/ dropping in a marble screwing on the lid/ standing in front of the broken/ electric beater shaking until whipped.’ Like most poems in the collection it lacks the full power afforded by striking, exactly right verbs and lines tightened to breaking point. Other poems, such as ‘Reality TV’, which deals with the televisation of 9/11, are unsubtle and overwhelmed by their subject: ‘Any minute now/ King Kong will appear beating his chest/ Against man’s inhumanity.’
Cliches - ‘seasons come and go’, ‘the roar of the crowd’, ‘swept under the carpet’ - betray a lack of attention to craft, and there is often little punch to opening and closing lines. Too often the strength of feeling which inspires Williams is also her downfall; more care, more control is needed for the big heart of this poet to truly sing.
GRAEME MILES - PHOSPHORESCENCE FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS, 2006
A thoughtful new voice, calm, measured, and sure in its rhythms. ‘Lenten Time and Fullness’ is one of several poems that quietly but firmly locates itself in this country, a land of ‘too-bright beaches’, where ‘(t)he mood-time of fullness is Australian winter,/ generous with water, kind-lighted,/ unconcerned that summer will come again’. In ‘This Town’ - ‘ganglion on a railway line’ - the deserted, dry atmosphere of many a small country town is affectionately evoked: ‘To meet on these streets/ would be a long, showdown approach/ to end in a sheepish greeting.’
There are reflections on many subjects: times of day (‘Some Hours’), language (‘Word Book’), the myths of Aristaeus and Orpheus (‘Circle and Line’): ‘He descended,/ yet no one descended, losing up/ and down on Escher stairways... He had sung himself/and now unsang it.’ Mysterious, enigmatic without being deliberately obscure, the poems in Phosphorescence draw the reader into a contemplative space where language resonates, and where nothing is overstated or out of place.
PETER MINTER - BLUE GRASS SALT PUBLISHING, 2006
Minter is a master of the abstract anecdotal poem, á la John Forbes, whom he acknowledges in ‘Garden Estates’: ‘book browsing/ on my way to work, Forbes’/ ‘Collected’ & ‘Lessons for Young Poets’/ in dry, glittering fragments,/ pure as snow.’ No explanations are given for a stanza’s trajectory, be it ‘My old leathery sweep scans/ asinine horizons, spies a carrier/ then another through the bloody narrows/ of his eye, the sea’s empiric glow,’ (‘Enterprise’), or ‘Going nowhere, that look of euphoria/ exactly like praxis/ thought through & executed on the upper west side,/ per diem covering expenses.’ (‘Intellectual Perverts’)
The collection’s music is jazz - intellectual, playful collages of sound, the rhythm of a phrase given precedence over its sense, or at least the communication of that sense to the reader - rather than the bluegrass perhaps implied by the book’s title, which takes its cue from a line in Homer’s Odyssey: ‘eastward into another land,/ the bluegrass plain.’ The love poem ‘is it is’ begins ‘It’s as if, again, wanting to know/ how to get it right, as we walk together/ seen from way below another cold/ April sky, there is justice/ in living, in giving ourselves away’, but this is a poet who does not wish to give himself away. Clever arrangements of words sandbag meaning away from the uninitiated, the reader not in the know, who may well wander away parched from their venture into the bluegrass plain.
CRAIG SHERBOURNE - NECESSARY EVIL BLACK INC, 2006
Nasty, gritty stuff. Sherbourne’s poetry lives at the racetrack and the journo’s club. The collection is an account of a life, from a boyhood at the track, where Uncle Keith ‘winks for me to go on lookout for police’ (‘On Course’), and tips of the trade are learned from Randwick pickpockets, who call the boy ‘Periscope’, ‘the way you’re up-down in the Herd’, ‘scouring for winnings among discarded slips’ (‘Suburban Confidential’).
With affectionate voyeurism Sherbourne delivers intimate, compelling portraits of his parents: ‘My mother slept in toilet paper./ She tore it from a roll in bandage lengths/ and wrapped it round her hairdo./ “A military operation” my father called it,/ staring into a Western...’ (‘Trophy Hair’). In ‘A Racing Life’ his father wins big at the track: ‘That night my father trampolined on the bed,/ flinging dollars from his mackintosh pockets./ My mother grabbed and shrieked,/ heaping a pommel of them in her lap,/ her temples wet from heat and drink/ as if there was water in money-rain.’
Sherbourne is a pleasure to read, for his controlled rhythms and lines, his brilliant observations, and his mastery of image and tone. Whether he is recounting a torrid first-sex adventure in the laundry (‘Brett’s Mum’), coming to terms with his parents’ ageing and deaths (‘The Live-Long Day’, ‘Ash Saturday’), or watching a spider ‘inspecting its webs’ (‘Wasteland’), he creates a fresh, original and memorable scene. In ‘Flirting’, a ‘black hair twisted in my meal’ becomes ‘a gift you’d plucked from your scalp/ in the kitchen, a test you’d dared/ across your table’, to be discovered later by his wife who ‘tore its arms’ length, crushed it in her fist,/ presented the remnants to me on her palm’.
I don’t like everything Sherbourne has to say, but boy, I like how he says it.
REBECCA EDWARDS is a poet and visual artist who lives in Brisbane. Her first young adult fiction, The River Sai, will be published this year by UQP. Her poetry collections are Scar Country, Holiday Coast Medusa and Eating the Experience.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au