The night’s live changes
by Tim Wright

Rabbit Poets, 2014

Free Will and the Clouds
by Rob Wilson

Grand Parade Poets, 2014

For all their contemporaneity, both of these books work with themes, or better, anxieties, that have always been at the heart of lyric poetry. In different ways, they are concerned with avoiding easy comfort in language and shying away from time and mortality.

Both books use the old trick (and a good one) of starting with a quietly atmospheric poem. Tim Wright’s The night’s live changes begins with: ‘sky currently gold’. Despite the suggestion of a romantic soft-focus in the title, the poem itself sparely and rapidly sketches the surroundings in which the rest of the book unfolds:
the room links into place
a light

where it wasn’t; tv
-buzz,
rooves, a shuttle of air
weighs
on a fringe
it’s
the usual –

the sound of the band
would carry
in each time the door opened
to the beer garden

The background is urban, the speaking voice a little uneasy in it, and other people are never far away, though not actually present. In later poems, the music that can only be heard when the door to the beer garden opens will come closer.

There is a pervasive nostalgia to the night’s live changes, especially nostalgia for the newness of late adolescence/early adulthood:
I think about
being seventeen
what it felt like
filing in
to the event
the excitement.

(‘November’).
It’s the details that are evoked in this nostalgic mood that give the poems their specificity and bite. ‘Music Poem’, for example, begins by missing ‘when music was life or death’ but the poem’s speaking voice reminds itself (and its readers) of ‘furry speakers’, a ‘cassette of a band / somewhere in photocopied Europe’ and ends with ‘Fugazi banging / at high volume engine off / with all the doors open dearly departed’. In the long poem ‘November’, where past and present mix fluidly, appear ‘The Smiths / defamiliarised’ (by being played at the wrong speed) and in the poem’s present:

At the studio
Merrick is making
wooden sculptures
of 1980s Apple Mac computers.

Not a bad image for what the poems in this collection do, too: recalling the eighties and nineties from the present, recording memory of a really quite recent, modern coming of age through an unlikely and traditional medium. But these poems do not pretend to create any sort of illusion of the past as present. They give instead the process of remembering. With its immediate visual impact, ’November’ is a sequence of memory specks gathered together, or points of spot-lit detail. This process of remembering winds its way through details of the present, as the speaking voice of the poem determines to write something before the year ends, trying it in different places outside or in the car or back in the kitchen.

If this tightly constructed little book begins by sketching its setting and themes in the first poem, it ends with equal awareness and discipline in its final poem, ‘Correspondence entered into’. After all of the restlessness and movement of the preceding poems (‘Moving through the world / is what I am interested in’, Wright notes in ‘November’), this closing poem offers at least a provisional settling. Yet the ambiguous reworking of the common phrase in the title suggests that this, too, is only provisional. It might imply cohabiting with another person (a kind of ‘correspondence’ to enter into) but it could also suggest that correspondence – negotiation – is not over. There is still an ad hoc feeling to ‘the sober missions out / and pieced-together / at the last minute weather’ of the last lines. The night’s live changes leaves its readers with avoidance of too strong or certain a closure, just as it had avoided too obvious a focus for its pervasive nostalgia.

Both The night’s live changes and Rob Wilson’s Free Will and the Clouds are tightly formed collections that have a clear sense of what they aim to achieve. Neither outstays its welcome. Both, I think, may look quite different when they have become early works in a longer series of books. As Wright’s book succeeds in avoiding the kinds of sentimentality that it risks, so does Wilson’s avoid the idealisation of poetic vocation.

Indeed, the blurb to Wilson’s Free Will and the Clouds describes the poems as ‘risk-taking’, and the poems do show a poet willing to take chances and to rely on his readers to follow some jagged moves. They are also poems that are tightly disciplined, and the collection as a whole has a solidity and consistency. Wilson is a writer of striking lines (especially titles), and the connections between these lines, and even more so between stanzas, progress more often in leaps than by steps. The movement of these poems is vital to their effect: there is a frequent tendency to strong stanza divisions, abruptly shifting the images. The poems often hint at a narrative or a line of argument, but the arrangements work more as progressions of harmonies and dissonances between ideas. Take, for instance:

They Can Put You in a Box

You may either stay awake forever
or sleep forever. I’d like a decision
by sundown.

A fragment of a kind of narrative can be extracted from this, but it isn’t really the point: what matters more is the sense of threat, of being at the mercy of something unpredictable. The abrupt shift in the final sentence, and the mock imperative tone with which the poem ends, both appear elsewhere, for instance in the last lines of ‘The Battle and the War’: ‘Sit around and listen to Chopin / and flip that fucking coin for once.’ The dream-like quality of these poems avoids turning to mush by keeping a sense of anxiety and loss. The loss can be both nonsensical and real at once (‘The part of your heartbeat will be played by / a smooth grey stone / high on a dark shelf’) precisely because of the poems’ oneiric tone. The roughly sonnet-like shapes of the poems, their humour and rapid shifts of voice and image suggest the influence of Berryman’s Dream Songs, though with even less obvious narrative drive than Henry’s death and resurrection give to that long sequence.
There are a number of recurrent themes and images in Wilson’s poems: humming machines, cameras, missing and dead (possibly murdered) people, boxes in which to be shut, ghosts, machines, coin-flips, holding breath. A few poems put famous names through absurd transformations. ‘Dante Poem’ opens:

The real Virgil
is still long in the tooth,
a gun salesman, he went down south to pray
and came back part of the canon.

The joke on guns and can(n)ons (unwittingly made in about a million undergraduate essays) is done lightly enough that it works, and the fun is really in the poem having nothing much to do with Virgil or Dante. ‘Bella Lugosi We Love You Get Up’ hangs a little closer to its named subject, opening:

Instead of coming to suck our blood,
the bats bicker over fruit trees
and we are with them in spirit.

It continues in mock-gothic (probably the best sort); I’d like to think that the title is partly a tribute to Bauhaus’s song ‘Bella Lugosi’s Dead’ as well as to the definitive screen vampire himself. There are frequent circles in Wilson’s poems, where the title returns in the poem’s closing lines. ‘Look at the Camera!’ only comes back to the topic of film in its final three lines, and ‘She’ll Be Apples’ spirals back to apples in its closing stanza.

From the dedication to the final poem, an overall circle encloses the collection, too. The book is dedicated to Benjamin Frater, a fellow poet who died far too young in 2007. Wilson had assisted Frater in publishing his collection Bughouse Meat and edited the posthumous 6AM in the Universe (the first collection published by Grand Parade Poets). The epigraph accompanying the dedication is the Latin proverb ‘Poeta nascitur non fit’ (a poet is born not made), and Frater was by all accounts a poet with a strong sense of vocation. The final poem in Free Will and the Clouds, ‘Poets Are Born’ returns to both the epigraph and to Frater (‘BJF’ in the poem’s dedication). The repetition and the circle it draws around the collection emphasise that this sense of poetic vocation is an important idea for Wilson’s poetics. Such a romantic notion of poetic mission, however, escapes sentimentality here in a couple of ways. Firstly, the instability of any sort of self in this collection prevents a sense of ‘I, Wilson, poet with a mission’ (that way lies bardic bullshit). Secondly, there is what the blurb calls the ‘for-the-hell-of-it’ mood of the poems. Wilson’s mix of wit, impersonation, half-joking and half-serious turns invites readers to laugh at the pose. There is, certainly, a seriousness underneath that pose; as with Wright’s collection, it will be worth seeing how the ideas underlying these poems might be confronted more directly in later work.

*Graeme Miles has published two collections of poems: Recurrence (John Leonard Press, 2012) and Phosphorescence (Fremantle Press, 2006). After completing a PhD in classics at the University of Western Australia, he spent six months as an Asialink writer in residence at the University of Madras, then a year in Belgium as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Ghent. He has lived in Hobart since 2008 and teaches ancient Greek language and literature at the University of Tasmania.

**Taken from Cordite Poetry Review at http://www.cordite.org.au