We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 113
WINTER 2008
REVIEWS
POETRYSo Much Light - James Charlton
Pardalote Press, 2008The American poet Robert Kelly once described the craft of poetry as ‘perfected attention’. It is clear from a reading of this new collection that James Charlton would readily agree. In fact, he expresses an almost identical credo himself in his judiciously placed opening poem ‘The One Thing’. A snake is meticulously observed and the observation of the snake leads to the wider observation:
One thing is necessary:
awareness of presence.And the poem then ends:
No longer us here and snake there,
but a simple abiding,
beyond the sinewy slippage of language.Quite unlike that of DH Lawrence, Charlton’s snake is a representative of that community of existence of which we are all part. He looks at the snake with clear eyes, neither demonising nor romanticising it, but accepting it. This Franciscan impulse is present in many poems, most overtly in ‘Sister Spider’ where of a bathroom spider with a ‘dusting of animated poppy seeds / on her back’, he writes
Greetings, spiders, with whom we inhabit
common space;And potoroo and magpie, also having a part
in us, and we with youThe reference to ‘sinewy slippage of language’, while a fine phrase, is a little disingenuous. James Charlton has an eye for paradox and certainly paradoxes abound when the world is examined closely. This particular line alludes to the tensile strength of words but reminds us, at the same time, of their inadequacies, if not their potential for deliberate misuse. Of course, language is all a poet has to express his/her vision. Beyond language is the inexpressible and/or silence, and here is where perhaps we must attempt to square this and the many other paradoxes James Charlton holds up for our inspection: ‘…we watch [the word spiritual] drift away into nothing, / into everything…’; ‘…what is worth saying may be said without a tongue…’; ‘…Truth is conveyed by what’s withheld…’. This last, though, is attributed to the journal of Simone Weil.
Gestalt psychology in the 1950s reminded us of the importance of the here and now and there is a continued emphasis on this in Charlton’s work. The vast majority of the poems in the book are written in the simple present, even poems which, like the moving ‘New Norcia Boys’, are set in the past. The use of the simple present gives the poems an immediacy and a clarity, and underscores the theological I am that not only informs so many of the poems but which in many ways is a linking theme. The use of the present, too, establishes a satisfying tension between the immediacy of the moment of the poem and the essentially reflective, at times revelatory, intention of the piece.
So Much Light should, in reality, be subtitled New and Selected in that a third of its contents first appeared in Charlton’s fine 2001 collection Luminous Bodies (Montpellier Press). A lengthy editorial afterword by Janet Upcher implies that the reason for this is that the earlier poems continue a conversation with the later and it is certainly true that the entire work has a continuity of theme and a unity of thought and (mostly) language which is impressive. James Charlton’s world, Upton reminds us, is a non-dualistic one, one which blurs and fuses the distinction between the physical and the spiritual.
In these post-postmodern days of winking irony and nudge-nudge demotic, it is refreshing to read a poet with such an unabashed spiritual project and, as well, such gravitas; one who brings such craft and integrity to his work. This is a rich and enjoyable collection with many pleasures and surprising delights. James Charlton’s world may not be ours, but for the space of fifty or so beautifully chiselled poems, he allows us to stand at his shoulder and share all of the clarity and light he finds in it.
JAMES NORCLIFFE is a New Zealand poet, novelist and editor. His most recent collections include Along Blueskin Road (Canterbury University Press, 2005) and Villon in Millerton (Auckland University Press, 2007). His 2006 fantasy novel The Assassin of Gleam (Hazard Press) won the Sir Julius Vogel Award in 2007.
SHORT FICTION
Geoff Dean - Under the Mountain, Esperence Press, 2007
Jane Williams - Other Lives, Ginninderra Press, 2007
John Saul - Call it Tender, Salt, 2007
Unlike the novel, the short story is all impression. Through necessity the short story does away with convolutions and analyses, preferring instead to use its brevity like a veil in order to enhance the mystery and captivate the reader’s imagination. Reading these three collections reinforced what I admire about the short story, what differentiates it from the novel and reminded me what it can achieve that the novel cannot.
Geoff Dean’s Under the Mountain is a chronicle of the life of the writer’s mind. The collection’s title story features an outstanding sequence in which a young girl falls into a reservoir. Residents find reminders of the girl whenever they turn on their taps: ‘stinking flesh – an arm in the bathroom, a leg in the laundry’. In the end the reader is spared the horror of these images with Dean’s subtle humour: ‘His brothers suggested it would be best if he kept away from the creek and never drank out of the taps at home without checking what was in the water first’. But the story might be stronger were it truncated. ‘Under the Mountain’ sells itself short (no pun intended) when it weakens the tremendous image of the unbearable, ‘outside’ world with an attempt at closure. ‘He thought that’s what growing up might be about’ is a phrase that undoes all of Dean’s work; it deadens the sinister ‘outside’ that he has brought to life, and rather than being a menacing vision of ‘outside’, ‘Under the Mountain’ becomes encumbered by its own purpose and convolution as though trying to fit into its big brother’s clothes.
The same goes for my favourite of the collection ‘Gelly Times’, a tale of obsession, in which Henry Parker is so plagued by an apparent mystery that he’s forced to question the nature of the universe. He might well be a Kafka creation, for he is struggling in a universe he does not understand and with an event he cannot explain. He is so distracted that he loses his job. And all might be well were that the last of it. But again the form eludes the author. The narrator, Parker’s son, doesn’t have the heart to tell his father the truth that would unravel the mystery (an iron bathtub between telephone wires; the result of kids playing with gelignite) until we are flashed forward to Parker’s deathbed where the son reveals all to the uproarious laughter of the dying dad. It all becomes neat and cosy, and again the story wants to become something it’s not.
What begins with the anxious imaginings of a boy ends in an accomplished manner with the author of this collection reading Theroux on a bench in Battery Park, still anxious and still struggling with the creations of his own mind. In keeping with the stories themselves, Under the Mountain is wrapped up with a bow, but, to Dean’s credit, the demons persist, leaving us with a sense of what drives the author.
Call it Tender is a busy, ambitious book, with so much going on that it’s easy to get lost in details and allusions. These stories are well-written and the author, John Saul, uses his own brand of syntax that, though grating at times, forces readers to think about what is being said and therefore involve and invest themselves in the prose. At first I took Saul’s subversion of grammatical conventions as a gimmick, but his persistence inspired my imagination. Having said this, I’m always wary of authors disguising their work, dressing it up. I have endeavoured to look beyond the fireworks.
Indeed, he had me from the outset. The first story of the collection, ‘G3, 5’, begins with a dark though humorous (Nabokov springs to mind) description of a suicide. This is what we are to expect: stories dealing in death, heartache, infidelity and shabby insurance claims set, in the main, in the late sixties/early seventies. Two stories, ‘Freewheeling’ and ‘Tender’, feature two different pairs of adulterous, tourist lovers lying in their Parisian holiday apartments discussing love, reading bad poetry and pretending that Paris annihilates the mundane realities of their home lives. In ‘Freewheeling’, the interweaving of italicised lyrics by ‘The Doors’ and Dylan is trite, heavy-handed and they buzz in the reader’s ear, but the recurring motif of the blood-sucking mosquito is nice.
‘Alice Balancing’ and ‘Taiga’ are told by alternating narrators. In both, the piecemeal descriptions are vertiginous; this is very well done. Among the shifting voices, however, are discussions of love and unrequited love. This is where the stories lose their essence, their ‘short-storyness’.
The brilliant disorienting effect of the writing is undone with Saul’s rough attempts to give the stories a sentimental bent. Alice is balancing and falling, as is the reader: Pete, Maurice, Daria, Ms Dorn and Malcolm seem a little irrelevant; or, rather, they fail to live up to their potential. Despite this, and the many narrators, the stories are not too difficult to follow and their heartbeats are audible amid the jangling devices. Considered whole, Call it Tender takes the reader through Mallorca, Berlin, Wiltshire and Suffolk, Mannheim and New Jersey in a surreal and demanding demonstration of the tenderness and fragility of love and other human connections, how fickle they can be, how they hang in the balance.
Like Under the Mountain, Jane Williams’ Other Lives focuses, in the main, on tender household relationships. The collection is short, less than forty pages, and each of the seven stories is little more than a vignette that describes a situation as opposed to following a narrative thread. You might say the stories are examinations of single moments that have lodged, for whatever reason, in the consciousness of the narrator.
In the denouement of ‘Gun Control’, a gun goes off in the middle of the family homestead. The buckshot leaves holes in the hallway wall. It is an arresting image. In the lead-up to this the narrator, against her will, is taken hunting by her father. All the guns are his. She hates guns but loves her aloof father who is awkward in matters of the heart and the father-daughter relationship culminates in the accidental discharge of the shotgun. A great moment of storytelling. And we, the readers, are not cheated: we can make up our own minds what it all might mean, why it feels right.
In ‘The Wedding Dress’, the narrator sells the eponymous object in order to buy a ticket on a Greyhound bus. The prose is cynical, anxious and juvenile. That is not to say, however, that the writing is trivial, just in character. Like the father in ‘Gun Control’, the female narrator is aloof and objective. One gets a sense of the isolation of the narrator when she describes marriage, with all its ceremony and costume, as theatrical, temporary and rigid, where everyone plays dress-ups. Selling the dress for a bus ticket is an affirmation of a reluctant bride’s dreams of freedom from convention and expectation. And although the prose is locked-in, the action – to which only a sentence is dedicated – is positive and rings out long after the story is over.
Williams takes on much in the stories in this collection and throughout I was left with the feeling of being the ugly cousin: peering in through the window, seeing everything, but unable to connect with what was happening or what had happened. It seems that in Other Lives we are dealing with shadows and ideas; however, I found it difficult to discover anything more than the action. There is gentleness and subtlety in the prose, but the issues take centre stage, to the detriment of the characters. Like ghosts, the stories wander around and blend into each other, which is not, in itself, a bad thing – quite the contrary. The stories rise up in harmony and speak of the anxiety of coming of age, of understanding the past and reinventing oneself. The final story, ‘Richie’, is fitting in this respect and tells of two teenagers hitch-hiking to the Gold Coast, on the run from home. In fact, themes of escape and captivity flow through all three collections. Although at times the characterisation in each is sparse and two-dimensional, there are some excellent moments of storytelling where the tale dissolves into an impression that leaves the reader suspended in the place between fact and imagination: truth, in short.
ADAM OUSTON writes stories, plays, screenplays and essays. He has been published in Voiceworks and various online zines. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tasmania and is currently working on a collection of short stories as well as his first novel.
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