Luminous Animals
by Emma Lew
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
Maps, Cargo
by Bella Li
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
Realia
by Kate Lilley
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
The Violence of Waiting
by Jennifer Maiden
Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014
Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases. Lilley’s ‘realia’ hammer to the page like Luther’s Theses, each new item increasingly absurd, poignant, etiolated: ‘Greta Garbo bear metal figurine / Greta Garbo stamped Edelweiss doe skin gloves gauntlet length … Greta Garbo mechanical terrier … Greta Garbo wind-up puppy in pink basket … Greta Garbo roulette ashtray.’ The list loyally refrains from any enhancing or explanatory judgement. Each described object vainly attempts to serve as metonym, a distilled abbreviation of its once owner, an aide mémoire, an attribute, such as Athena’s aegis, or Hermes’s winged heels. Objects replace the person and the poem attempts its rite of transubstantiation, exposing this as futile bid. The four poems of Realia are composed of carefully placed fragments, evoking, through sentiment they strategically evade yet imply, the unseen vanishing points of pathos and humour. Precise description memorialises: the ‘antler inkwell’ from Melbourne’s Trades Hall, in ‘Valet de Chambre’ signifying a past era, an obsolete trade; the ‘shaded o-mouth / painted sideglance … glad plaid’ of a doll from ‘Wax Composition 1926’ spins to life like Coppélia, with its sudden flush of present participles, or gerunds, ‘sleeping walking kissing’; ‘Plantation Dainty’ takes lines from Cajun and Creole slave songs, ‘les jours du temps passé’ (auld land syne), that stretch desire into death, as if yearning is always for obliteration:
She comes at night to croon me
les jours du temps passé
cream-top, picayune
she’s what I want and her I’ll have
lowers her face to mine
when love’s chains upon thee lie
buttons down her back as she goes
bonsoir bonsoir mes beaux yeux noirs
Only the poem can remember, as objects stack these radiant caskets. The last poem, ‘Letters of Caption’ – a formal term meaning, roughly, to request to bring an offender of the church into line – wittily re-charges some common phrases in unpredictable contexts: ‘Presentation feedback: good to see you! … Brevity fabrication error … Cheek to cheek in the unabridged / Yours forthwith to thrall and bond.’ In Emma Lew’s Luminous Animals, each poem plays an irresolvable dramatis personae of pronouncements, justifications, and opinions, some seeming to address one who stands accused for unspecified reasons. The Other in these poems may be frightening, yet contemptible, as each narrator enacts a paradox of both revelation and withdrawal, embalming and erasing their own integrity:
Chaos persists and leads to inner haunting,
spreading ruinously, as in dreams.
So I’ll go on suffering with a kind of relish
in the shadow of heroic virtues,
until my errors of allegiance are forgotten
or I fall into a brook one morning, very simple!
(‘Speculative Realms’)
Some poems tally instructions that parody conventional roles:
You must try to touch his heart.
Concoct a special soup in his honour.
Laugh and cry and be afraid, and so on.
(‘Mysteries and Lacquers’)
It is bitterness I want to teach her …
Sweet dreams, delusive hopes.
The taint is passed on from parent to child.
How could anyone as pale as she, I wonder, sit so silently?
I’ll never tire of punishing her.
(‘Finishing School’)
These brusque explainers define their separateness with many end-stopped statements gathering around them like moats, yet they also wildly yield (The Wild Reply was Lew’s first book). The Other is alternately wooed and rejected as hoodwinked despot, witness, or invigilator, the narrator’s character always a flagrantly unknowable display, deflecting with spurious gambits. These narrations twist through self-analysis, repeating and dissolving, with any sense of agency brokered with qualifications and self-sabotaging contradictions, sometimes mirroring the doublespeak of so much twentieth century history:
I concluded in a very slow and clear manner,
so as to assist the person whose job it is to write
everything down and
make a report,
“The death of the Red Army man should remain in our memories
all our lives as a lesson:
If the horse drowns,
proceed on foot.”
(‘Lesson’)
There is an element of the Gothic in these minatory phrases, these haunted apologias of defiant resignation or offhanded incantation that are declaimed and yet, with almost Gothic camp, wryly toyed into discontinuous narrative. Another interest is season: two poems mention autumn, and three allude to spring, one locating it in May – the air is tinged with the upheavals of European history and literature, a fitting setting from which to parry the interpolations of shadowy off-stage quibblers.
The first poem in Jennifer Maiden’s The Violence of Waiting, ‘George Jeffreys: 15: The Fourth Terrace’, takes us into Dante’s Inferno, the abode of the slothful imagined as a casino, in which some Labor Party politicians have gathered. Dante’s sloth is that of ungrasped opportunities, of insufficient love (of the good), and on the fourth terrace these blighted souls now rush in frenzy to compensate for their earthly sloth:
The air in here swirled that colour,
she thought, like aerated wine, all
restless, tired pearls, a hiss
of penitential moonlight, love
that was not enough at the start becoming
overwrought and angry at the last …
Upstairs,
Matilda offered some cold, flasked
forgetfulness and sublime
selective memory, but Clare
remained steeled to remember,
and George knew his own knowledge
of her history itself a steel anchor.
In this sweaty, tinselly atmosphere, Maiden’s George and Clare sharpen their philosophical positions while sceptically observing the ensuing procession. In ‘Diary Poems: Uses of Cosiness’, Sylvia Plath’s facility with homecrafts is described as being ‘desperate / for humanity and control’, that is, as in Lilley, such minutiae may signify, or even magically contain, character. As in previous collections, here Maiden directs odd-couple dialogues: Kevin Rudd and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt, along with George and Clare who appear through many volumes. These talismanic guides interpret the existing world as if time-travellers, wise elders whose ethics are more stable than those of their admiring adherents – partly confessors, partly loved parent-figures. Eleanor speaks to Hillary of the Osama Bin Laden assassination, critical of those televised reactions: ‘to have trapped oneself as an audience / to prove onself an actor isn’t what / I would ever want for you’ (‘Hillary and Eleanor: 10: the Coppice’).
The final poem ‘Maps in the Mind’ is similar in its economy and rhythm to ‘My heart has an embassy’, which imagined Julian Assange, in Maiden’s last book Liquid Nitrogen:
The isle of the dead is always sand …
The isle of the dead is never solved
by jungle fast last answers, planned
sensitive-isolate like species evolved
in feral fight and fear on Manus Island,
in fear on Manus Island.
This lyrical poem is partly in couplets whose repetitions and melody, not its matter, remind of Hopkins. The plaint of Hopkins’s ‘Spring and Fall: to a Young Child’ echoes in Mother Teresa’s words to Princess Diana, ‘we will now mourn for ourself.’ This pair converge as if painted in a Renaissance Visitation: ‘now she was wistfully, stilly alone / and Teresa stood beside her.’ Maiden’s poems are naturally political, wrangling the catastrophic here and now. The Violence of Waiting refers to those lukewarm souls who wait in the Inferno’s antechamber, but also refers to those, deemed guilty of the recently-invented ‘sin’ of seeking asylum, who wait in much nearer Infernos.
In his introduction to Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, Adam Aitken writes that Bella Li’s ‘poems are more like deracinated explorers’ journals … China is not hers … China is a library.’ In Li’s Maps, Cargo, prose poems expose the solipsism of early explorers – Cortés in South America, Franklin in the North-West Passage – who see only a desired ‘terra nullius’, just as Judith Wright exposed the Wilderness Society’s presumption of an unnamed wilderness.1 Yet it is colonisers and explorers, at once unbearable and sympathetic, who narrate these poems as they dauntlessly proceed to erase ‘wilderness’: only they possess character, as if the indigenous inhabitants form merely homogenised backdrops for an extinguishing gaze. This pocket atlas of colonialism moves from China to the Americas and elsewhere, through time. Facts frame tired or rapt asides, but Li’s interest is in the Melvillean quest itself, its compulsion and audacity. The second prose poem ‘Voyage’, indicating Baudelaire et al, also positions discovery as play: ‘The hold littered with props. Flat clouds drifting idly along the cardboard coast … my eyes reeked of distance’, and in ‘Three views of the Hindenburg, Ocean County’, part three simply states ‘(Stock photo.)’ – highlighting the writer as collagist and guardian of information. Another tracks the exiled prophet Muhammed:
Massacred, according to custom, the vast number of the inhabitants … One morning, according to the vast number of oriental historians, the sun ‘a little after rising, completely lost its light’. To the great astonishment of the astronomers, this darkness (in the easter palace persisting). Persisted until noon.
(‘E 44 10 N 33 15’)
Dashes, ellipses, are often deployed, as if any word can be arbitrarily assigned: place and time become generic components of colonialism. To own a thing is to desecrate, its attributes miniaturised into a performance of obedience. Reminiscent of Susan Howe’s suggestive gaps, Li’s gaps function as cynicism, a yawn for randomly designated place. This is reiterated in her use of a type of anadiplosis: beginning a line with the last word of the previous line, (a technique Maiden employs in her earlier ‘cluster’ poems) but more often, simply reiteration, or anaphora, beginning lines with the same words. Images are layered like houses around a harbour, theatrically doubling their importance, the solid thing suspended above then caught in the permeable waves re-interpreting it. Li uses lines from, among others, Pound, Ashbery, Seferis, Sexton, and the Guyana-born British poet David Dabydeen, as departure points in many prose poems. The last poem ‘Windows’, a somewhat jarring break from the ebbing dream-like prose, looks out from, or into, an americanised universe as if past feats of exploration are now transposed into the blandishments of a more insidious conquest.
1.‘… the Wilderness Society of Australia’s … aim, to ‘preserve Australia’s wilderness’ assumes that it is the right of the invaders, not the original owners, which is dominant everywhere except where Aborigines may be able to prove, before our tribunals, ‘traditional attachment … (Its) policy thus adds up to a confirmation and endorsement of the terra nullius judgement … That judgement has resulted, over the past two hundred years, in dispossession, destruction and the denial of all human rights to Aborigines, has turned all Aboriginal land in Australia over to destructive interests, and is the chief stumbling-block to justice and reconciliation’. Judith Wright, Born Of The Conquerors, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991, p49 ↩
*Gig Ryan is author of New and Selected Poems, Giramondo 2011 and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books 2012.
**Taken from Cordire Poetry Review at http://www.cordite.org.au
To Koskino 