We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 114
SPRING 2008
REVIEWS
POETRY SURVEYJUDITH BISHOP – EVENT SALT PUBLISHING, 2007
I had been waiting eagerly for Judith Bishop’s first book of poems to appear, having admired such poems as ‘Desert Wind’, ‘Rabbit’, ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’ and ‘The Definition of a Place’, published in ABR. There’s no doubt that Bishop is a beautiful phrase maker, and can craft some exquisite sentences, but many of the poems in Event, her first book, left me feeling baffled and disappointed. Sometimes an unconvincing or melodramatic ending can mar her poems, as in: ‘It Begins Where You Stand’, ‘Late in the Day’, ‘Passage of Winter Precluded; Or, Death Imagined’. Many poems seem to be gesturing towards rather grand poetic moments, but end up sounding vacuous and affected, producing emotional flatness instead of lift and height. This may be a result of the poems being under-processed; too many poems lacking the right amount of smelting needed to really extract the ore. It’s sometimes difficult to get a sense of what the poems are about. I don’t necessarily need a poem to be clear, but there does have to be something in it that I can feel has given me some pleasure – either through structural and linguistic devices, rich emotional content, and/or meaning; but the poems ‘Night Fire: A Letter’, ‘The Vow’, ‘The Shatter Rooms’, ‘Have Before, Would Again’, ‘Alice Missing in Wonderland’, ‘Agitation’, ‘Threnody’, ‘Affair’ and ‘Apology’ leave me nonplussed and uninvolved. It’s a pity,
because I feel that Bishop is a powerful talent. Her best poems are very good indeed, but she may have published her first book too early, though many of the poems in this volume have found their way into reputable journals. It may be that the reader will have to wait for her next volume to see the full strength and power of her talents.JAMES NORCLIFFE – VILLON IN MILLERTON AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007
This enjoyable book is New Zealand poet James Norcliffe’s sixth book and I am very pleased to be introduced to his work. In some ways, he reads like a fusion of Seamus Heaney and Charles Simic. His diction often achieves Heaney’s rough grainy texture, and his content Simic’s oddball, whimsical focus. These lines from ‘Festive Lentils’ illustrate the point: ‘flakes of smoked fish/ swim among the lentils/ in a sorrowful chowder// you’ve somehow curried/ your hair brightly spiked it/ like an orange
artichoke’. It’s a poem that skilfully manoeuvres the emotions through an imaginative range of metaphors. He achieves this also in the poems ‘Fish Salad at Latinos’, ‘A Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Moon’, ‘Inamorata’, in the powerful sequence ‘Samuel Marsden in Glory’, and most concisely in ‘The Attack on Baghdad’ in which the horror of war is evoked by wasps hungrily gathering around some fallen black peaches.Norcliffe’s work is mindfully honed and he applies careful torque to his generally short lines, preferring as a rule not to enjamb them. This makes for pithy, peppy, quick-read poems where each line moves the poem forward. For readers who may like more rhythmical, musical or cadenced lines, they will only find this in a handful of poems: ‘A Bevy of Fine Gallinaceous Birds’, ‘Love in the Jam-Maker’s Mansion’ (one of my favourites), ‘Omega’ and the beautifully achieved ‘Five Dark Rhymes’. Sound is a feature of Norcliffe’s work, but it tends to be brittle and raw rather than euphonic: ‘this is the strangest rain/this pitter-patter of blood/ clotting on the blotter/ of the yellow clod this gift/of god these gifts this arm/this leg and boyish gigot/this splash and splatter/chops brisket & cutlets’ (from ‘The Indian Rope Trick’). This book shows Norcliffe to be a skilful practitioner whose
poems find power through clarity of image and vision. I will certainly seek out more of his work.KEVIN BROPHY – MR WITTGENSTEIN’S LION FIVE ISLANDS PRESS, 2007
Kevin Brophy’s best poems in this, his fourth volume of poetry, are those from the fourth and final section of the book. It is here that the reader will find Brophy hitting his stride with imaginatively engaging, quirky, off-beat narratives. The surreal situation, an odd, slightly screwball character, a left-of-field perspective – these are the areas that Brophy works best in and which will reward the reader most. Given that Brophy is a poet whose poems are not especially memorable for their music, nor for their imagery, finesse of language, or form anddesign, his poems, in order to be satisfying, need strong and powerful
ideas. Without these, Brophy’s poetry suffers from imprecision and flatness, and unfortunately this is so for many of the poems. However, there are some poems in the volume which work beautifully for the imaginative reach and originality of their scenarios. I would refer readers to: ‘David’, ‘Shoe Laces’, ‘Negotiations’, ‘Story’, ‘Manual Work’, ‘After Rain’, ‘Ken
Baskerville’s Plastic Bag’, ‘Typing Tutor Program’, ‘Self-portraits’ and ‘How to Read a Poem’. But too often Brophy’s language and images do not have enough pressure applied to them, and as a result lines become loose and vague: ‘kangaroos float over paddocks. They move like fish/ through the air’; ‘we can roll helpless and harmless as thought,/ nameless as all the parts of water’; ‘flesh falls loose as memory’; ‘High, the plane slides through air/like a thought passing from question to answer’; ‘We filed into a chapel much like any chapel’. At times the sloppy use of grammar muddies the meanings of lines, especially in ‘The Hazy Ships’ which seems to make one false step after another. I can’t help feeling that Brophy’s real talents might lie more with the prose poem in which the key elements are attention to surrealistic logic, accelerated use of colloquial speech patterns, visionary thrust, and a reliance on humour and wit. Brophy seems more at home with these requirements and techniques than with the craft and techniques required to make other types of poems memorable.KATHRYN LOMER – TWO KINDS OF SILENCE UQP, 2007
At her best, Kathryn Lomer is a strong, highly engaging poet whose work is moving and well-grounded in place and human interaction, as well as in facts and details which underpin and enlarge her subjects. I thoroughly enjoyed the way she layers and organises her material, always using experience as her touchstone, yet also able to speculate, meditate,
educate. ‘Time Zones’ is perhaps the best example of the way she takes and leads a subject through its various levels of reference, expanding and developing, yet always with an eye on the inner, the personal. Similarly, ‘On the Tongue’ with its tripartite structure, moves very convincingly through both metaphors and strong physical detail to deliver powerful
observations about language, love and communication failures. Her poems are often boldly physical, lavish with detail, and a sense of the body, which is one reason why they feel so grounded and connected. I especially enjoyed ‘Transit of Venus’, ‘Hands On’, ‘Omphalos’, ‘Rolling Pin’, ‘A mother is like a tree’ for yoking so seamlessly the emotional with the physical.Despite her obvious power and facility, I feel that Lomer occasionally lets her poems run to fat, relying on wordiness and talkativeness, rather than finding the necessary craft or formal restraints that would render the poems with more concision. I wanted to feel that a greater sense of fine-tuning and foundation had gone into the form and style, and not to feel a ready-built, prose-like laxness creeping in. I sometimes wanted a
language that had a real price attached to it, and not to feel that the words came quite so easily. However, there’s no doubt that Lomer’s best work is spirited, pleasurable and engaged deeply with the physical details that inform and enrich our lives.JANE GIBIAN – ARDENT
GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING, 2007This first full-length collection of Jane Gibian’s work introduces a
poet whose work seems full of grace and luminous vision. She has a delicate and intuitive style and her poems often explore the liminal spaces between presence and absence, places where boundaries are moving and fluid. I felt very taken with many of Gibian’s nuances of perception, her evocative and emotionally persuasive lines beautifully rendered in poems such as ‘In October’, ‘Ardent’, ‘Fleeting’, ‘Unfolding’ and ‘Four Vessels for the Lapse of Time’. I very much like the inflections of voice and tone in her work, how she keeps the reader almost spellbound
to secrecy and intimacy by displacing her work from narrative. Gibian’s poems come at you from the side, or even from underneath. Things swim momentarily into view in all their delicate, mesmerising implications, and then they dissolve. The poems are often infused with irony, with a sense of loss and fragility: ‘in the calendar’s endless fretwork/ you give each
part of the day equal// thought; weight them evenly in your grasp,/ until it’s time to pull at a thread in the day/ and watch it unravel behind us.’ There are also some very impressive pantoums and haikus in the collection which brilliantly express the transient, fleeting nature of experience and perception. With this volume Jane Gibian has established herself as an impressively gifted and insightful poet, one whose work is poised, graceful, and though the poetry is often based on nuance and a sense of the fleeting and transient, it does have a discernible anchoring in music, rhythm and diction. This is a poetry of subtlety and beauty.
JUDITH BEVERIDGE has published three books of poetry, all of which have won major prizes: BARBARA HATLEY The Domesticity of Giraffes (Black Lightning Press, 1987); Accidental Grace (UQP, 1996) and Wolf Notes (Giramondo Publishing, 2003). In 2005 she was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial
Medal for excellence in literature. She lives in Sydney.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au