We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 119
SUMMER 2009/2010
REVIEWS
JUDITH BEVERIDGE
POETRY
GREG MCLAREN – THE KURRI KURRI BOOK OF THE DEAD PUNCHER AND WATTMANN, 2007
The majority of McLaren’s poems in this book are set in and around Kurri Kurri, a coal mining town in the Hunter Valley of NSW where he grew up. However, these poems are not simply descriptive of the ruin and defeat which can beset a country town. More than anything they evoke loss and sorrow of a personal, familial kind, and it is the way that McLaren so thoroughly fuses loss with the specifics of locale that makes his work so potent and engaging.
As you read through the book, it becomes clear that the tragedy underpinning so much of the work is the sexual abuse and later disappearance of McLaren’s brother. McLaren reveals this through suggestion and implication rather than by direct exposition. The emotional fallout from this event percolates slowly and with subtlety through the poems. You can taste it in the soil, in the flaking weatherboard surfaces, in the smashed glass, the peeling fence-posts and long grass of the Kurri Kurri backdrop.
There is a hard, ground-down physicality to many of the locales. Places are full of gravel, grit, stones, asphalt, coal dust. Kurri Kurri, McLaren tells us, will skin your knees and scuff your shoes, but its emotional consequences are more brutal and long-lasting. The title poem, ‘The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead’, with its attractive combination of seriousness and humour, explores the devastating effects of growing up in a town riddled with prejudice and violence; a place which cannot provide much beyond a set of narrow norms and foreshortened expectations:
I walked down Rawson Street in the dark,
knelt last Friday at the corner of Booth and Aberdare,
looking for faith.
I found stones, broken glass,
a football card.
The depiction of life lived in the shadow of the mining companies that have ruined and exploited so much of the landscape and brutalised many working lives comes through superbly in ‘Weatherboard Church’. Here the blighted landscape and the innocence of playing children are brought into sharp relief:
We stared out at the Kearsley Park roundabout
in that streetlight dark: the shallow pit,
the mark of circling children’s feet worn into it,
and the dust on the ground so thin
something else breaks through,
like old asphalt or moss.
Sundays we collected old train tickets along the mine’s disused railway picking between green coke bottles and chunks of silt coal.
In ‘Greyhounds at Dusk’ McLaren vividly depicts, through astute selection of detail, the dubious tenor of much of town life. The adjectives skilfully add nuance, precision and strongly announce the poet’s subjective presence. The women wear ‘thin’ headscarves, the gates are ‘rickety’, the fences ‘grey’, the clouds are ‘thick, grey-lined, massing over the east’, the muzzles of the dogs are ‘choking, tight-leashed’. Look how suggestive and indispensable the adjectives are in this line: ‘You wait for your mother’s shift at the shop/ to finish: there is the strange, green light,/ religious, of the coke bottles.’ The word ‘religious’ is haunting and chilling. In another poem, trees seen from a moving car are depicted as being like ‘a blurred barcode’ (Wangi). In another, the sky ‘Begins to grow old,/ an old lady’s bruise’(Dirt). Many poets are afraid of adjectives because they are often the first parts of speech to betray incompetence, but McLaren is well aware that adjectives are sourced from the senses and that they supply tone, feeling and also music.
He is also skilful with verbs. ‘I slur off the bed’ (Self-portrait with Pain Relief). ‘Those yellows/ are picked-out from the sun, scabbed onto the canvas’ (Sunflowers). This latter poem is memorable for the way in which associations of the sunflower’s yellow are evoked and how, as the poem progresses, the associations and implications drawn from the references become darker and darker. Through sharp, poignant, aurally engaging language McLaren leads us towards perceiving the sunflowers in a surprising way:
Sunflowers stretching past
the spectrum of beauty, or
suffering, or aesthetic intensity.
The drench and glare of sun-damage –
a light film of dust, or surface,
scattered over everything.
There are so many finely executed poems in this volume which travel remarkable distances through the subterranean maze of feeling and response. McLaren is a poet alert to the complexities and contradictions embedded in people’s moral and social lives and he is a graceful purveyor of the points at which these mix and intercept. I am less certain about the sequence of sixteen poems which occurs in the middle of the book. These poems have been pieced together from the transcripts of Max Harris’s 1944 trial for obscenity in Adelaide following his publication of Ern Malley’s poems in Angry Penguins. While this sequence may afford a window into the moral views and attitudes towards modernist poetry of the times, overall I found them much less compelling than the poems in the collection which probe and startle and engage the reader through an intimacy of tone and voice. Many of McLaren’s poems left me feeling entranced because of the poise and precision of the images. McLaren is a poet of refinement and distillation and, overall, this book makes you feel that he has explored the sensory and imagistic possibilities of his material to a most satisfying degree.
LOUISE OXLEY – BUOYANCY, FIVE ISLANDS PRESS, 2008
Buoyancy, Louise Oxley’s second volume, has an impressive range and variety of material. There are meditations and reflections on landscapes, artworks, creatures from the natural world and poems which deal with the pleasures and difficulties of relationships, desire and belonging.
The thoughtful, ruminating style is generally well-enacted through leisurely, flowing syntax, as is evidenced in the impressively executed poems ‘Surfacing’, ‘Line of Sight, ‘On Tuesday’, ‘Fitting’, ‘Wandering Off’, ‘Beelines’, ‘Things to Tell You: Day 193’ and ‘The Art of Unfolding’. This last poem begins with images of disturbance and unease; it then opens out into more accepting, inclusive images: ‘Today I learned/ other things: that serein is the fall of rain from a clear sky,/ and that a swathe is anything grass-like falling before the scythe’ before it moves into an understanding of how our darker emotions can limit, curtail and colour what we perceive. The way the poem’s thoughts progress through the imagery and movement of sentences is deft and pleasurable, and Oxley’s ability to yoke thought and image into a seamless progression is one of the best features of her writing.
The poem ‘Isaiah, backlit’ beautifully combines ideas of light and dark, past and present, memory and forgetting, through an examination of a family’s old photo. This photo also includes a man ‘Isaiah, the visitor from Mozambique,/ so black they had to light him from behind’. The photo has come to symbolise the mother’s inability to face change and disorder within family life and Oxley enacts this splendidly in the poem’s final lines:
She will not say, but every time she looks, Isaiah’s
there
behind you all, as if he’s risen from her Book,
his shoulder-blades ablaze,
an astonishment reminding her of forgetting,
a faith or fantasy she’s allowed herself:
black Isaiah, come to them with light.
The three dramatic monologues which open the second section of the book are also very fine. Intimate, imaginative, full of luminous and convincing detail, these poems are spoken in turn by the artists Munch, Van Gogh and Artemisia Gentileschi, whose voices and emotions are well-tethered and underpinned by insightful commentary on the nature of art and its effects: ‘it is looking at the sense of things/ for a long, long time that ripens a man’ (‘Self Portrait for Gauguin’). This poem spoken by Van Gogh is full of sensual phrases which enact the passion and put the reader squarely in the artist’s mind as he expresses his desire for an engaged and immersed connection with that which will make his art sing. The dramatic irony is poignant, but made even more so by the intensity of this concluding image:
I will be your disciple, Gauguin,
shorn of decoration. My eyes will indicate the Orient
– slanted and still – and the terrible
passions of humanity I will put behind me, reduced
to a pool of the most tender turquoise-green,
like jade washed in Aegean shallows.
In the poem written in the voice of Artemisia Gentileschi, Oxley gives her second sentence full rein over eleven lines, enacting and driving the artist’s passion to strong effect. The modulated tone, the alternation of long and short sentences, and the eroticism of the images all combine into a heady and striking scene of the artist engaged in an act of creation in which she is both subject and object: ‘The self/ duplicitous with Art must equal Artifice. La Pittura – I can be the act,/ the painting and the subject. And all because I’m feminine.’
Oxley’s poems about other characters engaged in either artistic or scientific endeavours are as rewarding, especially the long poem ‘The Radiolarian Atlas’ in which the metaphors describing certain plankton speak vividly of their particularity and uniqueness. ‘Line of Sight’ is also impressive for its metaphorical layering and the way the rhythms and shifting tonal weights play out against the poem’s formal poise.
However, not all of the poems in the collection are quite so realised. A few poems in the first section I felt were a little underfinessed. The endings of ‘North of Mount Cameron West’, ‘The Dragon’s Nose’ and ‘Walking to Witch’s Leap’ seem unconvincing and strained. The latter, a 44-line poem, is a single sentence which goes syntactically awry at line 24 and could have easily ended ten lines earlier. ‘The Integrated Shark’, while engaging, does have some distracting grammatical flaws in its first few sentences and would probably benefit from being cut back. ‘Silver Gulls’ also suffers from a lack of grammatical precision, especially in the third and fourth stanzas, which makes the poem rather unwieldy in its middle section. ‘Horsetails’ would be more powerful if some of its adjectives and lines were excised, as it falls into flatness and prosiness.
However, the majority of poems in the collection all attest to Oxley’s alert and sensitive eye and to the skilful way she creates tableaux of rumination and mood. Often, the rhythms of the lines play across seductive registers of voice, and sonically elucidate her themes of love, loss, memory, resilience, renewal and wonder. The best poems in Buoyancy work the images well into the rhythmic structures and move with poise and grace; the worst feel a little heavy and flat-footed, the lines too word-laden to float. But overall, there are so many poems in this collection to delight in and for which I feel grateful.
JUDITH BEVERIDGE has published four volumes of poetry. Her latest collection is Storm and Honey published by Giramondo. She is the poetry editor for Meanjin and teaches poetry writing at the University of Sydney.
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