nothing here needs fixing
by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Picaro Press, 2013

The blurb at the back of the book touts nothing here needs fixing as ‘a stunning attack on the pretentious white male gits who see poetry as an exalted profession to keep away from those who are loud, black, female, happy, or even in possession of lives outside poetry.’ This is a just war, and I’d rather be on Clarke’s side than the opposing forces’. But, as important as Clarke’s mission is, there are places where her strategy could use improvement. She sometimes relies on clichéd language instead of inventing her own state-of-the-art verbal weaponry, or marches through uncontested territory when she could be digging trenches closer to the front.

Let me continue by praising the book’s high points. The opening poem, ‘in karikatur australich deutsch’, showcases Clarke’s talents at their best. This playful German-English macaronic brings a humourous touch to the themes of childhood discipline, authority, and race. The jokes snap: Clarke arranges the first line so that ‘Epping’ (the name of both a Sydney and a Melbourne suburb) sounds hilariously German in the second line, as her speaker drily explains getting in trouble:

spoke / loudly
between the third and fourth
quadratic equations
of a forty seven minute study block

in the chalk-duster quiet
my mathematik teacher happened
to be speaking/ as well

=There’s also a well-aimed critical point underneath the jokes: this series of anecdotes doubles as a catalogue of petty abuses abetted by the Australian school system. Some of these abuses are explicitly racist – the classmate’s taunt of ‘hey blackie’, and the teacher’s refusal to defend the speaker. Others live in the weird no-man’s-land of plausible deniability – such as another overzealous teacher’s punishment of making the speaker write out:

I am a nuisance
and a hindrance
to the work/ and
education of others.

Here and throughout the book, Clarke’s writing shows the poetic influence of Grace Mera Molisa. Like Molisa, Clarke favours short lines, and end rhymes distributed at irregular intervals; they are both comfortable with multiple languages and registers. In addition to German, she plays with the language of nursery rhymes (‘a good woman in a difficult situation’) and of the King James Bible (‘boxing day’, ‘lot’s wife’). Both the Bible and nursery rhymes are invested with considerable rhythmic power, and Clarke turns this power to her own ends. She takes up unconventional perspectives – defending the old woman who lived in a shoe against slander, and giving plenty of empathetic attention to biblical characters like Mary and Lot’s wife – but the resonance of the conventional rhythms helps to keep the poems animated and afloat.

And like Molisa, Clarke is interested in the question of how to maintain self-respect in the face of intersecting oppressions. Her poems take up the themes of gender (‘boxing day’, ‘men and women’), race (‘in karikatur australich deutsch’), property ownership (‘landlording’, ‘open house’ and, in a global context, ‘drought’), and status as a single parent (‘sleep while the baby is sleeping’, ‘nothing here needs fixing’). Many of them defy easy classification: ‘leaving’ is about the effect of leaving a relationship on the speaker’s economic situation; ‘let alone’ is about the difficulty of being a woman and black and the single parent of a child. Her aim is to defend these marginalised identities, using a combination of personal anecdote and rousing general rhetoric. This lends itself toward preachiness in spots, but when Clarke brings her strongest poetic skills to bear on these themes – playfulness, oratorical rhythms, unusual or inverted perspectives – the results are impressive.

One of the standout poems in the book is ‘lot’s wife’. The Bible story devotes little attention to the motivations of Lot’s wife (she doesn’t even get a name). In Clarke’s retelling, she turns back to watch Sodom burning because she refuses to ignore injustice. With widely and irregularly spaced slant rhymes, the poem creates a subtle echo effect that suits the theme of looking back. This is particularly evident in the closing lines:

when they say
don’t look over
your shoulder
lot’s wife
i turn

I will not run
and let
my city burn

Another theme in the book is the experience of single motherhood – both its frustrations and its rewards – demonstrated best in the short poem ‘china’:

some nights
i boil the kettle
then set cups
for two

The image is intriguing in its ambiguity. Are the two cups for mother and child? Or has the child has gone to bed (it’s night, after all), leaving the mother to set the table for real or imagined adult company? The second teacup is either a symbol of cozy domesticity, or of loneliness. The appearance of the poem (a tiny cluster of marks surrounded by white space) might represent either of these.

Another single-parenting poem that benefits from its comfort with ambiguity is ‘being alice walker’s daughter’. Clarke considers the case of Rebecca Walker, who has criticised her mother, Alice Walker, for not being more present in her childhood. Clarke wonders:

will my daughter disown me
[…]

shit/ she always seemed to be climbing
on some god-forsaken stage

In this poem common parental worries – am I giving my child enough of my love? what if my child grows up to hate me? how can I set aside time for my own ambitions? – give a taste of the speaker’s particularity, as well as her connection to more universal aspects of parenting.

Some of the other poems on this theme are sadly underdeveloped. ‘sleep while the baby is sleeping’ opens a wonderful door, but fails to walk through it. The title line, Clarke tells us, is not merely advice ‘about shut-eye between feeds’, but a reminder that ‘us women must also learn/ to dream’. This is where the story ought to start. What dreams does the speaker dream between feeds? What are the obstacles she must overcome, and the strategies she deploys? Unfortunately, the poem ends before getting to any of the intriguing specifics. Likewise, ‘immediate sale’ begins ‘two children for immediate sale’ (a sentiment that I have often heard expressed by parents), and never moves past that musty set-up to what is special and particular about the speaker’s situation.
The book is weakest at the level of poetic phrasing and imagery, sometimes using stock ingredients when fresher ones are called for. Consider these lines:

a child was born
in bethlehem
beneath a star

but a childhood died
(‘boxing day’)
and
in the middle of everything
is the eye
of the storm:
…

that come-what-may
bittersweet/ brief
heartbroken moment
(‘leaving’)
and
in the end
of course
they’d warned her in vain
(lot’s wife)

there are children
…
who
want to give her the world
and are too young to understand
the unconditional nature
of a mother’s love
(somewhere on your street)

The refrains often clunk where they ought to reverberate. The most problematic poem, in this respect, is ‘thin air’, a lament for missing children. The words ‘thin air’ repeat throughout the poem, but the poem makes no special use of that accumulation – no attempt to contrast thin air with thick air, no reinterpretation of the refrain that would help it to do different affective things at effective points in the poem, nothing to raise it above the level of cliché.

Clarke has taken up a worthy cause in nothing here needs fixing. In the best parts of the book, she wields the rhetorical weapons of humour, irony, and flexible register with verve. But there are points where her words and imagery are too bland to bring her stories fully to life. I hope she keeps sharpening her blades: her ideas deserve the most impressive technology she can muster.

*Rachael Briggs. Philosopher by day, poet by night, Rachael Briggs splits her time between Brisbane and Canberra. She has published poems in Rattle, The Weekend Australian, The Tower Journal, and Cordite. Her first collection, Free Logic, is available from University of Queensland Press.
**Taken from http://www.cordite.org.au