Poetry

Paul Hetherington and Jen Webb, Watching the world (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

Hetherington and Webb, Watching the worldI hope it’s not condescending to suggest, at this time of year, that a book would make a good Christmas present? I know some publishers, and fair enough too, choose around now to release certain types of books deemed to be good gift material. That, however, is not the case with this book, Watching the world, as it was in fact published back in July. It’s just that I’m reviewing it now and, quite coincidentally, I think it would make a good Christmas book. This is not because it’s a light, easy summer read, as it’s not your typical beach book, but because it’s a very attractive book that is priced reasonably and that can be enjoyed in multiple ways. You can meander through it sequentially, stopping to ponder, or dip in and out, exploring what catches your fancy.

Subtitled Impressions of Canberra, Watching the world comprises poems by Paul Hetherington paired with photographs by Jen Webb. It has a rather interesting genesis, as the Introduction explains, in that it’s the “result of an extended collaboration” between the poet and the artist. Their aim was to explore Canberra as a place in which people live and work, rather than, as is usually the case, as a planned city that is also the national capital. I like that idea. Too often Canberra is used as shorthand for the federal government – as in “Canberra said today ….”. But, as we who live here know, there is far more to Canberra than that.

Hetherington and Webb’s method of working was interesting too. They worked, they say, semi-independently:

Jen took photographs, which Paul then used as springboards into poems. Paul’s poems led, in turn, to Jen taking new photographs, or editing existing ones.

They continued this “iterative process” until they found “enough poem-photo pairs” that would satisfy their intention. They suggest that in this method of working a new “reality” appeared, one that was somehow separate both from themselves as individuals and from their partnership, a reality which confronted them with ideas about “the incommensurability of world, image and word”. That makes sense to me – I think! At least, it makes sense to me that we never can completely or exactly capture in one form – say poetry – that which is in another form – in this case life in Canberra. It seems both obvious and sophisticated at the same time to make this point! And so, when you have a poem and a photograph both “commenting” on each other and on life in Canberra, then the meaning (or the “reality”) surely becomes multi-layered? Hmmm … I think I’ll leave the philosophising here, but I hope that I’m making sense and that I’ve understood what Hetherington and Webb are saying.

Now, I’ll get to more concrete stuff (a very poetic word, that), starting with the wider project. In the Introduction, again, we are told that it was initially produced as an installation for the Imagine Canberra exhibition during Canberra’s 2013 centenary celebrations. It then had a couple of other iterations – at a conference, and as a set of scholarly essays – before finding its way into this book form this year. I love that they have managed to achieve such varied mileage out of their work.

And finally, the book itself. The poem-photo pairs are divided into three sections – Where we live, Memory places, and Paddocks and perambulations. They are, as you’d expect from the process described, idiosyncratic, although there is logic too to the groupings. The first poem-pair is titled “Waltz” and captures the physical sense of Canberra. I was amused by the poem’s opening:

Like algebra, these straight-drawn streets,
curves, crescents and rounding circles

Starting with the “straight-drawn streets” must surely be a little provocative gesture to the popular cry from tourists that they get lost in Canberra’s circles! We do, I’m sure, have far more traditionally designed streets than circular ones. It’s just that the circular pattern is a feature of the inner, early Canberra where tourists focus. The accompanying image is a low aerial shot of a warm, cosy looking Canberra suburb in autumn. The poem suggests that there is magic in Canberra, that for all the apparent “algebra” in its straight lines and curves, there is much here that cannot be easily defined or narrowed down to simple formulae.

The poems vary in tone. There is, for example, a subdued reference to indigenous inhabitants in “Ainslie”, whimsical self-deprecation in the simply titled “Canberra”, and wry or defiant humour in “Letter”. At least, it made me laugh: a woman hands her letter to someone, perhaps a husband she is leaving:

‘I know it’s not done
to be so formal
but just this once
I’d like the last word’

The accompanying image shows the back of a blue car driving away in light rain.

Sometimes the meanings of the poems and the connections with the photography are clear and unambiguous, more literal perhaps. Other times they are more tenuous, or abstract, as in “Handkerchief” with its accompanying leaf-litter image, encouraging the reader-viewer to delve further. I enjoy these challenges. It would be interesting to see whether different combinations challenge different readers.

The images are, of course, important, though being primarily a verbal/textual person, my focus tends to be the words. However, there are some gorgeous images here. I’ve mentioned a couple already. I also like the mystical tone of the poem-photo pair titled “Boundaries”, the sense of coming into and out of our different spiritual and physical selves, our individual and our social selves, and so on. A simple image and a two-line poem. Perfect.

Some of the pieces are universal, that is, they could apply to a lot of places in which people live, but many draw on signs and symbols familiar to Canberrans – the circles, the balloons, and Black Mountain Tower, for a start. We are a bush capital, and along with our trees come the birds. I enjoyed the cheekiness of the poem titled “Birds” (and the accompanying image setting movement against stillness) which suggests that for all the planning, life in the city might have other ideas. If you are now intrigued, have a look at the sample provided online by Blemish Books. That will probably speak louder than my 1000 words!

Watching the world is a quietly subversive work that looks at Canberra from an insider’s point of view – with a lot of affection but a willingness to cast an acerbic or questioning eye at times too. And remember, it’s Christmas soon!

Paul Hetherington and Jen Webb
Watching the world: Impressions of Canberra
Canberra: Blemish Books, 2015
79pp.
ISBN: 9780994250827

(Review copy courtesy Blemish Books)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Black Inc’s Best 100 Poems

/ Whispering Gums / 20 Comments

I’ve been feeling rather guilty about a book sent to me in late 2013 by Black Inc. I’m usually very conscientious about reading and reviewing books that I’ve accepted for review – not so much for those sent to me “on spec” – but I slipped up with Black Inc’s The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter. As I recollect, it came just after a major overseas trip and got caught up in the run-up to Christmas. I did read much of it, but just didn’t bring it to conclusion in order to review. So, I thought I’d talk about it “right here, right now”, to use some current vernacular.

The bee hut, by Dorothy Porter

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc)

Black Inc, which won ABIA’s Small Publisher of the Year award this year, is a small publisher that actively supports Australian poetry. Not only have they now produced three “best 100 poems” volumes, but they have published the annual Best Australian poems volumes for several years, as well as individual poetry collections like Les Murray’s Waiting for the past, Robert Gray’s Coast road, and Dorothy Porter’s The bee hut (which I reviewed a few years ago now). All these books, as far as I can tell, are published in print and electronic format.

Now, the topic in hand. Here are the three “best 100 poems” volumes published to date, listed in order of publication.

The best 100 poems of Les Murray (2012)

I bought the e-version of this after hearing Murray (b. 1938) speak last year at Poetry at the Gods. As the only living poet of the three, Murray made his own selection. Unlike the Porter collection, in which the poems are grouped in some way, Murray’s selection is simply (though some thought is sure to have gone into the order) a list of 100 poems with no reference to their original context. Murray’s oeuvre is huge – his career has been very long – so without extensive research I don’t know where every poem comes from or how each fits into his career. As you would expect from a “best 100” they  are diverse in subject and style.

The first poem is “Driving through sawmill towns”, from the 1990s I think. Read it and see what you think. I like its understanding of human behaviour – the “tall youths look away” while “it is the older men who/come out in blue singlets and talk softly to you”. Meanwhile, “all day in calendared kitchens, women listen/for cars on the road/lost children in the bush,/a cry from the mill, a footstep -/nothing happens”. I like the sense of resignation in the inhabitants, but no judgement from driver driving through. A later poem, “Mirrorball”, from 2010, describes travellers on a bus riding up the Hume Highway through old towns full of history, but when the driver sets off again “half his earplugged sitters wear/the look of deserted towns”. Oh dear. Not all Murray’s poems are about country towns, but rural life is one of his ongoing subjects.

I’m not sure I really like reading poems in e-format, in which I bought this book, but the upside is that you can carry some poetry with you wherever you go.

The best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter (2013)

PorterBest100BlackIncThis is a posthumous collection selected by Porter’s (1954-2008) partner, the novelist Andrea Goldsmith. It includes a small selection of poems from her verse novel The monkey’s mask which I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read. (Having now read the few poems Goldsmith included here, I’m inspired to rectify this.) It also contains poems from her verse novels El Dorado and Akhenaton, as well as from various other collections of her rather extensive oeuvre. The poems range, for me, from beautiful, heart-rending, funny, and/or wicked to rather obscure. But that’s probably the nature of poetry. Those that draw on classics and mythology sometimes lose me, I have to admit, with their erudition, but her heart, her imagery and the way she can cheekily play with rhyme and rhythm are what I love about Porter.

I’ll just share one of Porter’s poems. It’s called “Circular Quay” and expresses discomfort with perfection, because experience has taught her so: “This perfect day/makes me uneasy … I breathe easier/spying some scum/floating/on a lovely green wave./Nothing’s perfect”. In the middle of this short tight poem she is reminded of the past. It’s the sort of poem that makes me write “Oh, yes” in the margins.

I’m tempted to suggest that Murray writes more of People while Porter’s poetry is more about the Personal. This is a rather coarse generalisation I know. These poets are highly diverse, but it’s how their writing, such as I’ve read in recent years, strikes me.

The best 100 poems of Gwen Harwood (2014)

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is the oldest of the three, and is the one I know least, so I won’t say much. I’ve heard her described as one of Australia’s finest poets, and readers I respect speak positively of her, but I really only discovered her when I started researching Australian poets for Wikipedia a few years ago. Why is this? I certainly didn’t study her at school or university, and since then, I must admit, my poetry reading has been very erratic. This selection was made by her son, John Harwood, who is also a writer. Her recurring themes, according to Wikipedia, include motherhood and the “stifled role of women”. Music, the Tasmanian landscape and Aboriginal dispossession also recur in her work.

From the compilers of these collections – the poet himself, the partner, the son – it appears that Black Inc has aimed to make these “best 100” volumes personal rather than academic in flavour, which is lovely I think.

Given these three volumes were published in the last three Novembers, I’m presuming another will be published this November. I wonder who it will be? Meanwhile, I’ll close by saying that these are gorgeously produced books – with lovely covers. They would suit those wanting an introduction to the specific poets as well as their fans.

 

Delicious descriptions: Richard Flanagan on Poetry

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

In my review of Richard Flanagan’s The narrow road to the deep north I talked a little about the importance of poetry to some of the main characters. I can’t resist sharing just a little more on this topic.

This is Dorrigo thinking, at the end of his life, though he doesn’t know just how near it is at the time:

He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much as possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving that the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food. The Australia that took refuge in his head was mapped with the stories of the dead; the Australia of the living he found an ever stranger country.

Dorrigo Evans had grown up in an age when a life could be conceived and lived in the image of poetry, or, as it was increasingly with him, the shadow of a single poem. If the coming of television and with it the attendant idea of celebrity – who were otherwise people, Dorrigo felt, you would not wish to know – ended that age, it also occasionally fed on it, finding in the clarity of those who ordered their lives in accordance with the elegant mystery of poetry a suitable subject for imagery largely devoid of thought.

I was thrilled when I read that Dorrigo, who was born around 1913, had “grown up in an age when a life could be conceived and lived in the image of poetry”. It reminded me of my recent observation that poetry seems to have played a more significant role in people’s lives back in the 1920s than now. So, for Dorrigo, poetry is what he turns to for sustenance, for meaning or explanation, in his life. He says at one point that he can sleep without a woman, but he can’t sleep without a book. I love the idea of a world where poetry is widely known, loved and referred to.

Anyhow, here is Nakamura, dying of cancer, thinking about “goodness”:

He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness. For he loved poetry above all, and the Emperor was a poem of one word — perhaps, he thought, the greatest poem — a poem that encompassed the universe and transcended all morality and all suffering. And like all great art, it was beyond good and evil.

Yet somehow — in a way he tried not to dwell upon — this poem has become horror, monsters and corpses. And he knew he had discovered in himself an almost inexhaustible capacity to stifle pity, to be playful with cruelty in a way that he found frankly pleasurable, for no single human life could be worth anything next to this cosmic goodness. For a moment, as he was being eaten by Tomokawa’s* oppressive armchair, he wondered: what if this had all been a mask for the most terrible evil.

The idea was too horrific to hold on to. In an increasingly rare moment of lucidity, Nakamura realised what was imminent was a battle not between life and death in his body, but between his dream of himself as a good man and this nightmare of ice monsters and crawling corpses. And with the same iron will that has served him so well in the Siamese jungle, in the ruins of the Shinjuku Rashomon and at the Blood Bank of Japan, he resolved that he must henceforth conceive of his life’s work as that of a good man.

Nakamura, as I said in my review, saw poetry as portraying “Japanese spirit” and it helped him justify his actions as commander of the camp. After the war, he gradually started to question his actions, but here at the very end of his life he wants, needs in fact, to see himself as a good man. And by force of will he does so, enabling him to choose as his death poem one which concludes with “clear is my heart”.

I love the idea of choosing your own death poem – and think I’ll start thinking about mine. What about you?

* He’s visiting Tomokawa, who had been one of his corporals on the Railway.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Poetry awards

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Over recent months, I’ve devoted several Monday Musings to exploring various Australian literary festivals and awards. I was inspired to write this one on poetry awards by two things. The first is that during my recent exploration of Australian literature in the first few decades of the 20th century, and particularly of the 1927 plebiscite conducted of Argus readers in Melbourne in 1927, I became aware that as much if not more of the discussions about the results focused on the poets. It seems – but of course, my research is somewhat serendipitous – that poetry played a greater role in literary (and perhaps ordinary) life then, than it does now. I’d love to hear what others think – or know – about this (in Australia or their other countries).

And then, following close on the heels of my these ponderings, I received an email from Five Islands Press announcing their new poetry award, the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, and asking me to spread the word through my blog. Now, my problem is that while I’m a big supporter of Australian literature, I don’t see myself as part of a formal publicity machine. I want to maintain some level of independence. However, given my recent thoughts about poetry in Australia and the fact that I haven’t yet written on poetry awards, I decided I could include this prize in a Monday Musings post on these awards. Make sense? I hope so!

The interesting thing about poetry prizes in Australia is that many of them are named for poets – far more so than the other specialised literary awards. I wonder why this is? Like other awards, though, they vary in their establishment and management, some being part of larger awards such as premier’s literary awards, some sponsored by writers’ organisations or festivals, and some by magazines or publishers.

I’m structuring this post a little differently to my other awards posts because they can be logically divided into fairly distinct categories. As always, of course, the list comprises just a selection. Here goes:

Lifetime achievement award

The best-known (and perhaps only) award in this category is the Christopher Brennan Award which is given annually to “a poet who has written work of sustained quality and distinction”. It is administered by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Victoria), and has been awarded since 1974. The award is a plaque, rather than money. Previous winners include the big names of modern Australian poetry, such as Judith Wright, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe, Dorothy Porter and Geoff Page, some of whom I’ve reviewed on this blog.

Awards for poetry in book form

(Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

CJ Dennis, ca 1890s (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Some awards are made for individual poems (see below) while others are for poetry collections, or long poems that are published in book form. These awards include:

  • Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry: established in 1977 and administered by FAW (Vic). The prize is currently $1,000.
  • CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry (part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards): established in 1985. The prize is currently a cool $25,000.
  • Grace Leven Prize for Poetry for a volume of poetry by an Australian writer or a naturalised Australian of at least 10 years’ residence: established in 1947, so is one of the oldest awards. Its monetary prize is small, but it’s apparently highly regarded by poets and has been won by many of Australia’s best known poets.

Awards for poetry, limited by length

  • Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize for a single poem or “linked suite of poems” of up to 80 lines: established in 1996 and administered by Island Magazine. First prize is currently $2000, with two prizes of $500 able to be awarded at the judges’ discretion.
  • Peter Porter Poetry Prize for a poem of up to 100 lines: established by ABR (Australian Book Review) in 2005, and renamed to honour Peter Porter in 2010. There is a cash prize and publication in the ABR.
  • Ron Pretty Poetry Prize for a single poem of up to 30 lines, not limited by nationality: established in 2014 by Five Islands Press in the name of its founder, the poet Ron Pretty. The inaugural prize will be $5,000. There is an entry fee, and submissions are made online.

Awards for unpublished poetry

  • Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript by a Queensland author: established in 2003 by Arts Queensland. The prize is currently $3,000 plus a publishing contract with UQP.
  • Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem for a poem or suite of poems of up to 100 lines by an Australian writer: established around 2000 by Arts Queensland. The first prize is  $1,000, one week at the Writers’ Retreat at Varuna, and publication in Cordite Poetry Review.

And something a little different

Rather different to the above awards, and others of their ilk, is the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. It is a biennial award that is offered alternately to enable an Australian poet to visit Ireland and to facilitate the visit of an Irish poet to Melbourne. Interesting, huh? Established in 1992, it commemorates the life and work of Buckley who was a poet, critic and Professor of English at the University of Melbourne and who loved both Australian and Irish poetry. The prize includes a return airfare, a contribution towards living expenses and an honorary fellowship at the University of Melbourne. The winner in 2002 was Cate Kennedy, well-known for her short stories and, as I’ve discovered, her poetry. She has also won the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry.

More awards are listed at Wikipedia. It’s not complete either, but it’s a start.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Red Room Poetry Object Competition 2014

/ Whispering Gums / 5 Comments

Just a quick Monday Musings today but an interesting one I hope.

Red Room Poetry Object is a poetry-writing competition for Australian students in Years 3-10. It was created by The Red Room Company, which is a not-for-profit organisation that was established in 2003. It apparently grew out of the Red Room Radio Show. The company’s aim is to create “unusual and useful poetry projects which transform expectations of, and experiences with, poetry.” They want to make poetry more accessible,  especially to “those who face the greatest barriers to creative opportunities”. They run a wide variety of, mostly, public poetry projects of which the Red Room Poetry Object is just one.

The Red Room Poetry Object was first held, I think, in 2013. It involves young writers and their teachers submitting poems of 20 lines or less about objects that are special to them. What a great idea – it provides some level of structure and framework, while being very open as well. According to the website, the 2013 project involved 72 schools from Australia and New Zealand, and they published 1200 poems by students and teachers. You can read the students’ poems here. The winning poems were exhibited from November 2013 to February 2014 at Customs House in Sydney. Submissions for this year’s project are now open, and poems can be submitted until 19 September.

Can this Snow Gum in the Snowy Mountains be my object?

Can this spirit-moving Snow Gum in the Snowy Mountains be my object?

While, formally, a “talismanic object” is “an object that brings a person protection or good luck” (like coins, a ring or other piece of jewellery), for this project Red Room is looking for objects that are special to individual people, objects that “may not be worth anything to anybody else”,  that may only be precious or important to the writer (like a favourite teddy bear). The winning Secondary Student poem last year was “My book” while the winning Primary Student poem was “Nitro car”. It’s just ten lines, and concludes:

You have an engine in your head,
and wheels in your shoes
that’s why I love you.

(James, Year 6, Holy Saviour School, NSW, Winning Student Poem (Primary), 2013)

“Making the objects sing in a new way” is how one judge apparently described it.

The teacher’s resource book includes exercises for handing out to students. I particularly like the one on “Overcoming clichés and using specific imagery”. It encourages students to think of a clichéd image, such as “as blue as XXX” and to then replace it with a more apposite image. I was only thinking about clichés the other day, about the struggle to find fresh words to use in reviews. So hard … I think I’ll go off now and have a go at that exercise …

PS the Red Room Company ran an event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, the culmination of a project, which received funding from the Australia Council, and which they coordinated with ARTAND Australia.

 

 

Wrapping in the rain

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Mr Gums and I spent last weekend in the lovely historic town of Beechworth staying with two other couples in the gorgeous 1890s Indigo Cottage (owned by one of the couples). Quite coincidentally, we discovered that this weekend was Beechworth’s WRAP Festival. That’s Writers, Readers and Poets, an annual event that has been sponsored by the Beechworth Arts Council since 2011.

Amy Brown

Amy Brown

Of course, some of us wanted to check it out. I didn’t manage to get to sessions with Tony Birch, author of the Miles Franklin short-listed novel Blood. However, Eric, of Canberra Jazz blog, and I did get along to Poetry at the Post Office where, under umbrellas protecting us from the welcome drizzle, we heard several, mostly local poets read from their work.

They were a varied bunch, some more experienced readers than others, but they all gave us something to think about, from Geoff Galbraith’s political pleas to Lisa Ride’s satires on modern living, from Jean Memery’s tribute to janitors to Amy Brown’s moving poem in the voice of the infant saint Rumwold from her epic poem, The odour of sanctity (published by New Zealand’s Victoria University Press). The odour of sanctity sounds intriguing. She explores “six candidates for sainthood” from the 300s to the 1990s. What a fascinating topic! Anyhow, the session was relaxed, nicely em-ceed by Estelle Paterson, and showed what a local Arts Council can do to support and encourage literature in country towns.

Eric, who juggled note-taking in the rain better than I, has written up the event in more detail on his blog – with photos. Do check it out. Thanks Eric for doing the write up and for standing in the rain with me!

Poetry at the Gods … with Les Murray

/ Whispering Gums / 22 Comments

What can I say but that it was wonderful to be in the presence of the man who is arguably Australia’s greatest living poet, Les Murray. Poetry at the Gods is a monthly event which has been run for many years by local poet Geoff Page*. (The Gods is a cafe-bar attached to the Australian National University’s Arts Centre.) I have only managed to get to a few readings over the years but, having had to miss Murray in the past, I was darned sure I was going to make it this time. Not only did I get there, but I got my copy of his Selected poems (Black Inc, 2007) signed. Woo hoo!

Before continuing, I should briefly explain Murray for non-Australians who may not have heard of him. His career has spanned over forty years. He has won multiple awards, has published many volumes of poetry (not to mention verse novels and prose works), is on the National Trust of Australia’s 100 Living Treasures, and is often spoken of, here at least, as a Nobel Laureate contender. I must admit that I don’t always get his poetry – but I enjoy the challenge. That’s poetry isn’t it?

Les Murray, Best 100 poems

Courtesy: Black Inc

Now to the evening. Murray read in two “sets” both lasting around 30 minutes. The first set comprised unpublished (I believe he said) poems written in recent years, while the second came from The best 100 poems of Les Murray published by Black Inc in 2012. (I am currently reading their Best 100 poems of Dorothy Porter).

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about the reading. As much as I love attending poetry readings, because it is special to hear poets read their own poems, I find it hard to report on them. No sooner is one poem read, than the next one starts. It’s impossible – for me anyhow – to process the poems and say something meaningful about them as a whole. I will however make a few scattered observations.

I’m not sure how much Murray, now 75 years old, had planned in advance what he was going to read, but it looked pretty impromptu. In both “sets” he simply (simply?) flicked through the book he was reading from and chose poems he seemed to feel like reading. Sometimes he provided a few words of introduction to the poem, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he gave a little chuckle before or after, and sometimes he didn’t! In the first half, the poems ranged across such diverse subjects  as an apartment block in Beijing, English as a second language, and the challenge of writing haiku. I wish I had them before me. The variety spoke to an active, curious mind, to the poet’s ability to draw something beautiful, meaningful, from pretty well anything, which is what we want our poets to do, isn’t it? Oh, for such a mind.

In his second set, he read some poems that I do have before me, poems such as “The future”, “Postcard”, Lyrebird” and “Dead trees in the dam”. One that has stuck in my memory is the poem about his son who has autism. Titled “It allows a portrait in line scan at fifteen”, it was written when his son was fifteen, and perfectly conveys what I understand to be the experience of living with autism:

Giggling, he climbs all over the dim Freudian
psychiatrist who told us how autism resulted
from refrigerator parents

The poem conveys the split between the person and “it”, the condition. There’s humour, frustration and anger, as much the son’s as the parents’. Murray conveys the fascination with facts and rules, the focus on objectivity, the prodigious memory, that can be typical of autism. The final lines are heart-rending:

He surfs, bowls, walks for miles. For many years
he hasn’t trailed his left arm while
running.
I gotta get smart! looking terrified into the
years. I gotta get smart.

Religion is important to Murray. In fact, the two books of his that I have are dedicated “To the glory of God”. However, his poems are not, overall, self-consciously religious, are not dogmatic but many are informed by a faith in and an understanding of religion. In this context and as one who likes thinking about words and truths, I enjoyed poem “Poetry and Religion”. Here are the opening lines:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said until it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

And that, I think, is as good a place as any to end on, don’t you think?

*I’ve reviewed his verse novel The scarring.

Lesley Lebkowicz, The Petrov poems (Review)

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Canberra poet Lesley Lebkowicz has made a couple of brief appearances in my blog: first in my post on The invisible thread anthology, and then when she won this year’s ACT Poetry Award. I was consequently more than happy to accept for review her latest book, The Petrov poems.

English: Evdokia Petrova at Mascot Airport, Sy...

Evdokia being escorted by two Russian diplomatic couriers to a plane at Mascot Airport, Sydney (Presumed Public Domain, from NAA, via Wikipedia)

It’s intriguing that nearly 60 years after the events, we are still interested in the Petrovs. In fact, I have written about them before, in my review of Andrew Croome’s historical novel, Document Z. Most Australians will know who they are, but for those global readers here who don’t, the Petrovs were a Russian couple who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra in the early 1950s. Vladimir (Volodya), Third Secretary, and his wife Evdokia (Dusya) were both Soviet intelligence officers (or, to put it baldly, spies). They defected in 1954. The defection was particularly interesting because Vladimir defected first, and Evdokia two weeks later at the airport in Darwin after some dramatic scenes at Sydney’s Mascot airport.

At first glance, The Petrov poems looks like a collection of poems but in fact it is a verse novel, albeit one comprising many short individually-titled poems. These poems are organised into four “chapters”: Part 1, Volodya defects; Part 2, Dusya defects; Part 3, The Petrovs at Palm Beach; and Part 4, The Petrovs in Melbourne.

I must admit that I wondered, initially, why Lebkowicz had decided to write about the Petrovs, given that they have already been picked over in novels, non-fiction, theatre, and television. But, as soon as I started reading it, I could see why. Lebkowicz gets into the heart of these two characters, bringing them back to ordinary human beings who were caught up in something that was both of and not of their own making. It is a rather pathetic story. There are no heroes here – and yet, as happens with these sorts of things, it captured the world’s attention for a short time.

Now, before I comment specifically on this book, I’d like to quote another Canberra poet Paul Hetherington from an interview with Nigel Featherstone in the online literary journal Verity La:

One of the ways I recognise the poetic is when I find works in which language is condensed, ramifying, polysemous and unparaphraseable. Part of what I wish to do when writing poems is to make works that speak in such ways – but to do so without resorting to any kind of trickery or artificial obscurity.

While I wouldn’t use words like “ramifying” and “polysemous”, and while we can paraphrase the ideas to a degree, this is pretty much what Lebkowicz achieves in The Petrov poems. In just 80 pages or so she manages to not only tell the story of their lives but get to the nub of their hearts and psyches – as much, anyhow, as anyone can do for another person. We learn that Volodya is not succeeding at spying:

He wants to succeed but stumbles. Failure
follows him like iron torn from a roof and
rattled along the wind.
(from “Glass I”)

We learn that he loves Dusya (“Dusya is his place in the world”), but that he loves booze, his dog and prostitutes more. He seems weak, but he’s a man struggling. With Stalin’s death and the arrest of his boss, he fears reprisals when he returns to Moscow. Here he is at the moment of defecting (which he does, after disagreements on the subject, without telling Dusya):

Once again he’s going to be wrenched from the soil.
He remembers his father – struck by lightning, buried up to his neck
by foolish men, and dying in the freezing night.
Then chaos and not enough food. Uprooting a full-grown plant
is no easy thing: so many roots
are wound through the earth. He mutters the Russian words
for sadness and home and ruffles his Alsatian’s fur.
(from “Loss”)

Dusya, on the other hand, is a stronger character, but she has suffered severe losses in her life, including her first love and her daughter:

This is something Dusya does not allow herself to think: how her
life might have been if Romàn had not been arrested. […]
If she had gone on taking happiness for granted. Living with
Romàn had been like walking along a winter street and arriving
in a field of warm poppies. If Romàn had not been broken in a
labour camp. If Irina had not died –
(from Romàn I)

While she understands Volodya’s fear, she fears even more what might happen to her family if she defects. At Darwin airport she doesn’t want to make a decision: “If only/this government man would abduct her”. But of course he can’t.

We then watch them as their relationship falters, first during ASIO’s interrogation, and then the years of living together in Melbourne, officially in disguise but known nonetheless. (“The whole street knows they are Petrovs -/too many photos, too much publicity”).

While I’m not a Petrov expert, I’ve read enough to feel that Lebokowicz’s interpretation is authentic. She explores what happens when the political interferes with the personal; she recognises the pull of culture and the despair that losing one’s home can engender; and she sees that corruption is not confined to communism:

so when ASIO falsifies (No! Not falsifies –
amends, adjusts, even corrects) the documents
he brought from the Embassy – of course he assents
(from “Bones”)

Australian Women Writers ChallengeThese are wonderful, readable poems. They are poetic but, to quote Paul Hetherington’s goal, without “trickery” and “artificial obscurity”. The imagery is strong but clear. I particularly liked the way Lebkowicz varies and plays with form. None of it is rhymed, but there are sonnets, couplets, poems with multi-line stanzas but closing on a single dramatic line, and others. There are poems with short lines or terse rhythms, indicating action or stress, and poems with long lines conveying thoughts and reflections. There is also a shape-poem, “Torment”, in which the zigzag shape mirrors Dusya’s distress (“Her life is a staircase that switches directions”).

Like any good historical fiction – if a verse novel can be called that – you don’t need to know the history to understand the story told here. And like any good historical fiction writer, Lebkowicz has produced something that enables us to reconsider an historical event from another perspective and to understand the humanity below the surface of the facts. An excellent and moving read.

Lesley Lebkowicz
The Petrov poems
Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013
95pp.
ISBN: 9781922080141

(Review copy supplied by Zeitgeist Media Group)

Two under-the-radar Australian literary awards announced

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

A couple of lesser known – but significant to me – literary awards were announced over the last week or so, one national and the other local. I’d like to tell you about them!

ALS Gold Medal 2013

The ALS Gold Medal is awarded by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. It doesn’t usually get a lot of publicity, partly I suspect because it doesn’t carry a large purse but, rather, well, a gold medal! It is ” awarded annually for an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year”. Last year it was won by Gillian Mears‘ Foal’s bread (my review), which also won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (for Fiction). This year the medal was won by Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of travel, which also won, in May, the Miles Franklin Award. It’s my next read – and I can’t wait. The judges said:

Questions of Travel embarks on an exploration of the present and emerging conditions of late modernity on a scale that could only be successfully achieved by a highly accomplished writer. Through her two central characters, Australian woman, Laura, and Sri Lankan man, Ravi, De Kretser creates an expansive fictional space that both traverses continents while never losing sight of the separateness of individual lives defined by their especial relationships to place and culture, new and old. (AustLit News)

It was selected from a shortlist of five, which included books that haven’t been appearing on many other shortlists: Jessie Cole’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, Robert Drewe‘s Montebello, Christopher Koch‘s Lost Voices and P.A. O’Reilly’s The Fine Colour of Rust.

For reviews of these books, please check out Lisa at ANZLitLovers who’s already read them all!

ACT Poetry Prize 2013

I don’t often report on poetry prizes, and particularly not on local ones, but given my focus on Canberra’s Centenary this year, I figured why not. And, anyhow, I like the winning and shortlisted poems. There were apparently 128 entries, and they were judged by a blind panel of local poets, two male, one female.

The winning poem (and you can read it and the two shortlisted ones online) is “Inside” by Lesley Lebkowicz, whom I only really discovered this year through her short story about her immigrant parents,”The good shoppers”, in The invisible thread. “Inside” is about that invisible disease that afflicts women, osteoporosis, about living with something “inside”. Interestingly, this is also what “The good shoppers” is about, though what the characters are living with inside in that story is their experience of the Holocaust. “Inside” is a short poem, just 15 lines. Its language is accessible and evocative

Inside her, bone sheared off from itself like
limestone in a private landslide – and she fell.

But just when you think that’s all there is, you get the ending. It adds another layer to the story. Read it (using the link in the first line of this para).

The two shortlisted poems are also by women – Libby Porter (“Stabat Mater”, a bittersweet poem about loss, framed through perspectives on age) and Elizabeth Lawson (“Emily Kngwarreye”, a wry poem about indigenous versus non-indigenous attitudes to art). You can read them too at the link.

Canberra is, I think, blessed to have such excellent poets.

On the literary road: Gundagai Redux

/ Whispering Gums / 10 Comments

20130509-154945.jpgGundagai, a small country town only two hours drive from my home, was the first place featured in my first literary road post back in 2009. I didn’t on that occasion write about its early history.

The Gundagai area was home to the Wiradjuri people, and was settled by white people in the late 1820s. It was officially gazetted in 1840 despite repeated warnings by the Wiradjuri about the risk of large floods to this part of the Murrumbidgee River floodplain.

According to the Poet’s Recall Motel, Gundagai’s first streets were named for poets: Shakespeare Tce, Milton St, Pope St, Johnson St, Maturin St, Landon St., Hemans St, Sheridan St, Otway St, Byron St, Homer St, Virgil St, and Ovid St. However, believe it or not, the Wiradjuri knew their country and in 1852 a huge flood destroyed the town. Over one third of the 250 inhabitants and a number of travellers died, and 71 buildings were destroyed. The old mill is the only building still standing from the original town. As for the poets, when the town was rebuilt, on higher ground, the poet street names, according to the Motel’s notes, were not reused. However, looking at a modern street map of Gundagai, I did spy Sheridan, Homer, Byron Streets, plus a reference to Ovid Lane and the other poets. Presumably these have been returned to the town in more recent times.

Anyhow, this is where the Poet’s Recall Motel comes in. The owner – I’m not sure when – decided to revive Gundagai’s poetic history. Each motel room is named for a poet – the original 13 and then some. I was rather delighted to find that our room was Banjo Paterson, and the two rooms next to us were Henry Lawson and Breaker Morant. Fine room-mates for Whispering Gums! In addition, the historic bar in the motel’s restaurant is decorated with painted portraits – on local slate – of the original 13 poets.

Once again I’ve learnt that country towns can be surprising places … I don’t imagine I would ever have heard of Felicia Hemans, who was published in the early nineteenth century by John Murray, Jane Austen’s publisher, if I hadn’t stayed at the Poet’s Recall Motel.