Και καμιά φορά τύχαινε καθώς που κοιμόμουν
να κρεμάζει το χέρι μετέωρο
έπαιρνα τότε το μικρό ψαλιδάκι
που κρύβοντας πάντα στο κομοδίνο μου
για να κόβω τα νύχια μου
και προσεχτικά μη ξυπνήσω
τη γυναίκα γυμνή γυρισμένη στο πλάι
έπαιρνα να κόβω το χέρι μου
σκάλων’ η λάμα στο κόκαλο πάντα
σκριτς σκρατς
θα μπορούσα και να ουρλιάξω
αν δεν με είχανε
χρόνια τώρα
ακρωτηριάσει

***

Τη μέσα μου μέρα μετρώντας
χαραγμένη
το χέρι κορμί
αναμνήσεις σπαράγματα
ν’ αμφιβάλλεις
σάρκες πληγές
πρόωρα
χαραμάδες
διαμελισμένες κραυγές τα χαράματα
υπήρξε άραγε στ’ αλήθεια
κανείς απ’ τους δυο μας
εκεί;

***

Τυφλωμένος την υδρωπικία του πάθους
που ο χρόνος ανατινάσσοντας
την υστερόβουλη αναμονή
μέχρι ξανά
που μέρες ξοδεύοντας
τις νύχτες αναπολώντας
που μόνος μακριά
η μέσα μου ματιά σκίζει τα στήθια σου σ’ άλλα χείλη
το φύλο σου
άπληστα χιλιάδες δάχτυλα διατρέχουνε τον ιδρώτα σου
άλλα
κορμιά
του κορμιού σου φωτιά
αίμα ποτάμι με πονάς

***

Χώμα κορμί ορίζοντας
ο μεθυσμένος πόνος
άσπρο του άστρου στο άκρο η σιωπή
ο επιδεινωμένος χρόνος
πλατύγυρη βουή εφήμερο μαρμαρυγή
και διχοτομημένος μόνος
στο βάθος πλήθος πλάτος
παράταιρος
η ήττα κράτος

***
Continue reading →

ΤΟ ΠΟΙΗΤΙΚΟ ΠΟΡΝΕΙΟ

α
το σπίτι μας είναι μια κλειδωμένη νύχτα
η μέσα γυναίκα τρομαχτική
με βαθυκόκκινο φρουρό και ενώτια από δυναμίτη
μιλάει με οιωνούς
απόψε κι άλλοι άνδρες του Άδη
θα μαγαρίσουν το φουστάνι της

β
κύριοι αλητεύουν καπνίζουν διαπομπεύουν
το βασανισμένο σώμα της
ενδεδυμένο ακόμη
πριν τίξει τη σάρκα του και γίνει ψυχή

γ
κάτω από την γλώσσα
επί της γλώσσας
η γλώσσα της λειχίας και της ποίησης
είναι το κλειδί της ευτυχίας τους
δεν το γνωρίζουν

δ
είμαστε δώρα
νταν ντιν νταν σήμαντρα σήμαντρα σωματικών ειδήσεων
εν ποιήσει γυναίκες νυχτερίδες
κρεμασμένες ανάποδα
απ’ τα σιβυλλικά μαλλιά μας
οιωνίζουμε την μοίρα των κυριών

ε
αθανασία στο ποίημα
η ποιήτρια καταζητείται
τα νύχια της ποίησης βοηθάνε
να χαράξετε ονόματα χαράς
πάνω στους τάφους σας

ζ
η ποίηση φοράει πάντα μαύρα φτερά
και ακριβά μωβ παντελόνια
αντιγράψτε την ποίηση
φορέστε μαύρα φτερά
κι ακριβά μωβ παντελόνια
.
ΕΠΙΘΥΜΙΑ

πάμε να κολυμπήσουμε στους καθρέφτες
με λυτά μαλλιά χωρίς μάτια
μόνο με χαριτωμένες κοιλιές
από σαρκοβόρα μικρούτσικα στόματα
μόνο με στήθη ρύγχη
ας παίξουμε ως χαρίεντα τελώνια
στον υδράργυρο των ματιών τους
και λιγωμένους έρωτες ας υιοθετήσουμε
το γένος των φαντασμάτων υπηρετούμε
μα γυναίκες χειροπιαστές θα ξαναγίνουμε
μόνο από αρσενικό φιλί
προς ώρας
φορέματα εμείς ανήξερα από πλεκτάνες
ω πόσο θέλουμε πόσο παρακαλούμε
να ε ξ α π α τ ή σ ο υ μ ε τους ά ν τ ρ ε ς
να αγαπήσουμε την σάρκα μακριά απ’ την ψυχή
και την ψυχή εντός κερματισμένη στην σάρκα

*Από τη συλλογή “Νεκροταφείο φορεμάτων”, εκδόσεις Τύρφη 2016.

Earth Girls
by Lisa Brockwell
Pitt Street Poetry, 2016

phosphene
by Tamryn Bennett
Rabbit Poets, 2016

Lisa Brockwell’s Earth Girls and Tamryn Bennett’s phosphene are both compelling first collections in their own right. Reading them side-by-side, however, an equally compelling contrast emerges. Where Brockwell looks for clarity and direct engagement with her audience, Bennett invites interpretation, offering many clues and few concrete answers. This contrast reveals something else: the strengths of one approach do not threaten, or cancel out, those of the other.

In an interview with Northerly editor Barnaby Smith earlier this year, Brockwell outlined her approach to writing poetry: ‘Accessibility is a priority for me, but not at the expense of intelligence, nuance or complexity,’ she said. ‘I want my poems to be accessible, but by that I just mean that I want a reader to be able to engage with the poems, to find something there. That doesn’t mean the poem is easy, or able to be explained.’

This balance is clear in every one of the poems that make up Earth Girls. Often it’s Brockwell’s titles that do the heavy lifting, spelling out a subject and allowing the rest of the poem to move freely around it. ‘On Becoming a Housewife for the First time at the Age of 41’, for example, begins:

I learn to cut up a melon, though remain unable to bring a knife to a whole chicken. I save small lizards from the dogs. I find myself on tuckshop duty with my dearest friend; at university we didn’t see this coming.

In other poems, such as the short, seething ‘Honey’, it’s the slow reveal of a story that holds our attention:

Where is the honey? You asked me
that morning, wide awake to the menu
of the world. I hadn’t seen the honey
in years: the jar a harem of sun,
radiant and louche, perfected by a city
of drones

In her interview with Smith, Brockwell explains that Earth Girls brings together seven years’ worth of work. The care she has taken in choosing pieces for the collection is obvious. With the exception of one or two minor poems, most are strong enough to hold their own ground. More than a few offer the satisfying jolt of an original comparison: ‘Window box platonic’ for example (‘Waiting for the train’), or ‘tambourine / of wind in trees’ (‘When I run’).

The two-part poem ‘Laika and Oleg’ is one of the high points in the collection. This is a moving account of the fate of the dog Laika, the first living creature to orbit the earth, and of the man who selected and trained her:

Metal walls, the only smell is chemical,
disorienting me like those blank
corridors in the lab. When I close my eyes
he comes to me with ‘good girl’, with his warm hands

It’s an unflinching poem, almost bruising to read. There are points when it’s tempting to stop altogether, but Brockwell leads us gently forward through Laika and Oleg’s story.

Brockwell consistently combines line breaks at natural pauses, with those that draw the reader down to the rest of a phrase. This technique creates a steady rhythm that supports her exploration of other difficult subject matter. For example, the three-part poem ‘Uluru’ – another crest in the collection – begins with characteristic openness: ‘Three days after my middle miscarriage / we went to the desert.’ Further into the poem we see another of Brockwell’s strengths: her insistence that her poems share personal experience, then stretch beyond it:

… Within minutes I knew
a dingo took that baby. Then grief grabbed me
with its jaws. This country could not
countenance a woman who did not collapse
on prime time, who would not unstitch herself
in front of strangers. A woman at her very edge.

In her acknowledgements Brockwell mentions contemporaries including Judith Beveridge and Dorothy Porter – two poets with a breathtaking ability to communicate both lurking menace and joy in apparently everyday subjects. At its best, Earth Girls reaches toward these unspoken things with the ‘lucidity’ Porter spoke about in her 2001 Judith Wright memorial lecture. ‘Lucidity can write with a tongue of fire,’ Porter said. ‘Often it’s a sense of urgency, a sense of dire times, that can make a poem searingly lucid.’

While Brockwell’s subjects generally remain close to home (her poems on the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 tsunami and the amusing ‘Jennifer & Angelina’ notwithstanding) this ‘sense of urgency’ is achieved on a local scale. Again she pushes beyond personal experience into wider social observations in the ekphrastic series ‘Point of View,’ which responds to the work of Tasmanian landscape artist Philip Wolfhagen. At one point, the speaker expresses her relief that the painting in front of her is not:

… one of those where she
is waiting around, always out of frame
while some idiot she is married to
takes their only horse, dresses up
in a tin hat and does some grandstanding.

The points where the collection could be stronger – and they are rare – occur when Brockwell strays beyond clarity into over-explication. Indeed, it’s the polish in the majority of the poems that makes a meticulous reader itch to pull out a word here and there. For example, the lines ‘Sitting / on the rocks in her swimming costume, / her hair wet and loose down her back’ (‘Seaworthy’) are enough to complete the picture without the next line: ‘a woman who has just finished her swim.’ Similarly the qualifiers in these lines could be left out: ‘For me, it’s after the harvest, only just / but even so, a different season’ (‘Waiting for the train’).

While Earth Girls generally adheres to structures and themes familiar to readers of Australian poetry today, Tamryn Bennett’s phosphene occupies an entirely different space. This is the fourth book in the Rabbit Poets Series published by Rabbit: A Journal of Non-fiction Poetry, adding to collections by Jordie Albiston, Tim Wright and Geraldine Burrowes plus three more debuts launched with Bennett’s collection. It continues editor Jessica L. Wilkinson’s exploration beyond the bounds of the poetry we’re used to – bringing attention to the experimental, and testing the limits of nonfiction.

Phosphene is made up of four poems and spans 50 pages, using meticulous typesetting and blank space to create movement – a sense that the poems are spreading across the pages. Each English stanza is mirrored by a Spanish translation courtesy of one of Bennett’s collaborators, composer Guillermo Batiz. The work of visual artist Jackie Cavallaro also complements the text, adding an intricate visual layer to the book. In Bennett’s introduction we learn that phosphene actually began life as a collaborative exhibition with Batiz, Cavallaro and performer Tamara Elkins.
Bennett explains that her work on phosphene began in Mexico ‘as a series of rituals and offerings at sacred sites’. ‘Offerings were tied with thread and placed in the ashes of shrines, cracks of temples and beneath desert dust,’ she explains. ‘Mirroring ruins and fractured histories, the fragmented elegies of phosphene are what remain after the light of the moment has passed.’ This is lofty subject matter and it’s to Bennett’s credit that she works toward her goals through scarcity of language, rather than weighing these ideas down with words. The following stanzas from the first poem, ‘at the temple of letters’, give some idea of Bennett’s compact approach:

white on red
we roam the ruins

white on red
all sins, all saints

It’s clear that Bennett wants more than just the physical space created by short lines. There’s also expansiveness in terms of subject matter. The third poem in the collection, ‘the invisible’, best illustrates this. It begins in a misty valley before moving ‘through fields of cactus / to the desert by the sea’. The poem then begins to switch between confined spaces – rib bones, a wardrobe, a hall, a mirrored room and holes in a wall – and open spaces: a green stream, the sky, and a ‘garden of bones’. The elegiac quality of the book is perhaps most pronounced in this poem. ‘the invisible / keep living’, Bennett tells us, ‘sadness stacked / in towers / surround the bed’.
Along with Cavallaro’s finely detailed images, punctuation marks are also dotted around the poems on most pages, suggesting the desert dust Bennett encountered when first creating the work. This also adds to the sensation that the poems are floating, suspended above the page rather than printed onto it.
The fact that each line is doubled through its Spanish translation is another crucial element. As each poem progresses, it feels natural to match each English word with its Spanish translation. ‘Owl’ becomes buhó, ‘chance’ becomes azar and ‘holy nothing’ becomes bendita nada. This pattern concentrates each line, bringing the shape and meaning of every word into focus. With shorter lines, this focus becomes sharper still, as in this section from ‘the invisible’:

aquí,

el suelo recuerda

Taken as a whole, phosphene is a wild, open landscape with features that only gradually become familiar. Finishing a first reading, we find hints of this expansive, quiet world, but the full picture isn’t clear. This is a space that invites many repeat visits. It’s with each subsequent reading that phosphene rewards us.
As the book becomes more familiar, each page takes on the quality of an individual artwork as well as being part of a greater whole. The book’s rhythm can be heard as the speaker, the accompanying ‘you’ and the minor characters, move back and forth between confined and open spaces, and through time. This movement is anything but linear – it’s closer to a spiral or a layering of images and memories. As the book ends, Bennett hints at completion without giving in to neatness:

here is where you leave
your hair,

in the desert,
in his hands

With each reading it becomes easier to see how Bennett is contributing to the tradition she notes in her introduction – that of the ‘xopan cuicatl’ or ‘spring song’ of Nahuatl poetry: ‘Each of these acts is part of a longer thread,’ Bennett says of her work. ‘Each a knot to remember the past and our place within it.’
It’s tempting to end here by finding similarities between phosphine and Earth Girls – to look for a way to bridge any perceived ‘gap’ between an experimental project and a lyric one. These two works do share many strengths. Both have a clear goal, are precise in working towards that goal, and show wholeheartedness in each step taken. But their real strengths are actually entirely independent. Far from placing them in opposition, these differences reinforce each poet’s place on the flourishing continuum of Australian poetry today.

*Alice Allan is a writer and editor living in Melbourne. Her work has been published in journals such as Rabbit, Going Down Swinging and Offset.

**Taken from Cordite Poetry Review at http://cordite.org.au/reviews/allan-brockwell-bennett/

(ταξ)ιδιώτες

Μια θάλασσα κάμπια
της πανώλης εξάγγελος,
τα μάγουλα των εμπόρων
τα θρύψαλα των νεκρών μας,
οι παραθεριστές να παζαρεύουν
με τα σωσίβια στη ράχη:
-Ένας φακός! μια σφαίρα!

Ωστόσο πάντα ο άνεμος
πληρώνει το λογαριασμό.
Πριν ανοίξει τα γκαρσόνια
που σκύβουν να του ξεφύγουν
κι εσύ θαρρείς πως υποκλίνονται.

***

Κίτρινα

Στο Θόδωρο Αγγελόπουλο

Ήμουν πάντα ο φαντάρος
που ναύλωσε τη γριά
σχεδία της Μέδουσας
Εισέπλευσα στον ωκεανό
απλά για να χαϊδέψω
τη χαίτη ενός προβάτου
Δεν υπήρξα θαλασσοπόρος
Σε ένα ποτάμι στάθηκα
και κάρφωσα την παλάμη μου
Έκτοτε ακόμα περιμένω
τη μάνα του αντάρτη
την ερωμένη του αστού
να φιληθούν, να φιληθούν
πάνω στην άδεια γέφυρα

***

Πριαπισμός

Μία διεύθυνση
της χειρονομίας μας
Στο μπαλόνι
που εξαπολύει
ο ξυπόλητος ήλιος
Η βελόνα στο χέρι σου.
να υφάνουμε το φως
που ολοένα υπόσχεται
την επιείκιά του
στις ανεμώνες
κάποιας άνοιξης

***

Μπράλος

Συγκερασμός ή ένωση
μια κωδωνοκρουσία
κυοφορεί το σύννεφο
τρομάζει τα σπουργίτια
που πεταρίζουν ξέροντας
μονάχα τη νεροποντή.

***

Αποχαιρετισμός στα (ρ)όπ(α)λα

Σάπισε η μεμβράνη μου
και δε βροντά το ταμπούρλο
μιας ψυχής σερπετής
στο καρφί και το κάρβουνο

μόνο ο τρελός κηπουρός
με το μπκιρένιο ποτιστήρι
φυτεύει τις σταγόνες του
στο στέρνο που λαχτάρησε
να πει ένα τραγούδι

*Από τη συλλογή ‘Εσωτερικό σωλήνα”, Εκδόσεις Πανοπτικόν, Θεσσαλονίκη, Δεκέμβρης 2008.

Antigone Kerala

Ania Walwicz

By Sneja Gunew*

In dreams begins the journey. . . (Kefala, 1973:5)

How easy is it, even now, to attach notions of the literary to ethnic minority writing? If not, then what are the implications for practitioners who wish to participate in selecting the words which, according to Barthes, consolidate social meaning? ‘Literature remains the currency in use in a society apprised, by the very form of words, of the meaning of what it consumes’ (Barthes, 1967:38). What kind of signification is ethnic minority writing permitted within Australia? Such writing is not usually received as ‘literature’ which, for the moment, can be described as a textuality which is visibly more worked over, and more conscious of textual conventions, than other forms of writing, and whose implicit opposite is the apparent ‘disorder’ of speech (ibid.:25). If we accept the suggestion that ethnic minority writing signifies only within the formations of sociology and history then, paradoxically, its value lies here with speech rather than writing. In other words, when made synonymous with migrant writing, it is the migrant’s speech (rather than writing) which is solicited, and the more disordered it is the more authentic it supposedly sounds. In those terms, ethnic minority writing is valued precisely in so far as it is inscribed with the marks of linguistic naivety and (even) incompetence: broken language is perceived as symptomatic of subjects not yet ‘assimilated’ (rendered the same) or ‘naturalised’.

In the little writing of this kind which receives limited exposure (whether autobiographical or autobiographically based), any obvious signs that the language has been crafted are read nonetheless as relatively unmediated confessions (see chapter 5). Complexities, if acknowledged, are thought of as provided by ‘life’, the complicated history of the migrant or marginalised subject–rather than by any consciously wrought textuality. To consider ethnic minority poetry, for instance, is under those circumstances therefore perverse. Poetry, the least transparently functional manifestation of linguistic self-consciousness, can be read only with difficulty for sociological or historical content. In Barthes’ terms, classical poetry is ‘a speech which is made more socially acceptable by virtue of the very conspicuousness of its conventions’ (ibid.:48). To write poetry means that one is staking a claim to the literary and hence to public cultural participation. On what grounds can this be legitimated, more particularly when the language used is patently either not English, or, if English, then filtered through other languages and literary traditions with their own codes, canons and conventions? Those ‘conspicuous conventions’ alluded to by Barthes are not simply acquired when setting foot on this continent, nor are they part of the naturalisation certificate. Rather, they belong to that cultural ghosting which floats above the home territory and signifies a mystery only gradually comprehended after many rites of passage. Poetry? From ethnic minorities? Classic realist narratives, perhaps, and reluctantly, but not poetry.

To some extent, as I have argued elsewhere (Gunew, 1985), the experience of migration, particularly when it involves negotiating another language, changes the conditions governing signification. In some ways, speaking psychoanalytically, it may be seen as analogous to re-entering the Lacanian symbolic (Wilden, 1968:xii), or (in classic Freudian terms) changing the secondary, censoring processes of the preconscious (Silverman, 1983). In either model we are dealing with a foundational process in the construction of human subjectivity, namely the conditions under which subjects both participate in and are produced by signification. To enter language is to become a social being rescued from the incoherence and anarchy of drives, ‘the mental representative of a somatic impulse’ (ibid.:67); but inevitably this is achieved at the cost of certain repressions, including degrees of alienation from the drive.

In the last few decades there have been considerable efforts to mark the discursive formation of Australian literature, in gendered and cultural terms, as predominantly Anglo-Celtic and male. Hence the work of those who consider the implications of treating Aboriginal writing as either true to oral traditions or colonised by white forms (Davis and Hodge, 1985; Benterrak, Muecke and Roe, 1984), and also of those who see women’s writing as throwing new light on, for example, foundation myths of mateship and the bush (Modjeska, 1981; Ferrier, 1985; Schaffer, 1988). The further complications offered by poetry written from non-Anglo-Celtic perspectives raise questions about the modernity of such writings that relate as much to form as content (Sollors, 1986). Those able to think from the beginning in more than one language find it impossible to consider language as a ‘natural’ and unproblematic expression of experience. And those who have experience of more than one culture may find it more difficult to regard one culture as universal. As David Malouf points out:

What we may have to be vigilant about is the groups in our society who feel that the culture belongs to them, who insist that their version of the culture is central or the only authentic one. Mostly the only cultural history we get of a society is the one that is passed down to us by those who have power, privilege and the use of language. (Malouf, 1985:61)

The reception of Walwicz and Kefala has been instructive in so far as it can be read symptomatically to gauge the ways in which ethnic minority writers are positioned in Australian culture. Let us consider Kefala first.

I am tired, living at home among strangers,

sitting at the same tables,

waiting for an acceptance that never comes,

an understanding that would not be born,

the measure in us already spent. (Kefala,1973:8)

Continue reading →

Ο Αζόρ

Δεν είναι από pet-shop
(δεν είναι καν ημίαιμος)
Δεν τρώει σκυλοτροφές
ούτε κονσέρβες

Δε δέχεται λουρί στο λαιμό
κι ας λατρεύει τις βόλτες
Είναι αλλεργικός στα ψεύτικα
χάδια και στα κουνούπια
Δεν κουνάει την ουρά του
όταν χαίρεται (δεν έχει τρόπους)
Συνήθως γυρνάει με άλλους
ανυπάκουους σκύλους,
που γαβγίζουν αλλιώτικα
ή τρέχει μονάχος στους δρόμους
Πάντα μισούσε τις αγέλες
ο μπαγάσας,
όσο και το λουρί
Γι΄αυτό δεν επωλήθη

***

Για ‘κείνους γράφω

…που τσακώθηκαν με την άνοιξη
κι έζησαν μόνο με χειμώνες
αναλωμένοι
σ’ ένα ημιτελές και
άρρυθμο πολλές φορές, περπάτημα.
Μ’ένα βηματισμό που αγνοεί
τις όποιες χειρολαβές
αυτού του κόσμου.

Με τους απόκληρους
του συρμού θέλω να μιλώ,
που κραδαίνοντας το ακυρωθέν
εισιτήριό τους, ήλπιζαν
σ’ ένα βαγόνι επόμενο
μα τακτοποιήθηκαν στριμωχτά
σε λίγα εκατοστά φτωχού τσιμέντου.
Ξεχασμένοι απ’ το κομβόι
σε κάποιο αδιέξοδο
χωρίς καν μια ειδοποίηση,
έστω μια πινακίδα επικίνδυνης στροφής
μια έξοδο κινδύνου.
Θα ΄χουν, φαντάζομαι,
έναν άλλο τρόπο ανάγνωσης
των όσων γράφω.

***

Αερόστατο

Έχω ένα αερόστατο
μέσα μου κρυμμένο
Ίσως κάποιες φορές
το αέριο του είναι ελλιπές
ή ο αέρας μέσα μου βαρύς
και δεν πετά
– ζαρώνει στάσιμο στα χαμηλά.
Βαρίδι γίνεται στα πόδια
και το σέρνω.
Είναι όμως εν δυνάμει πτητικό
Αυτό το αιθεροβάμων υλικό
που κρύβω μέσα μου
με στιλώνει και με κρατά ορθό
όταν απογειώνεται.
Γι’ αυτές τις πτήσεις του
και μόνο
αξίζει το κουβάλημα.

*Ο Ε. Μύρων διατηρεί το ιστολόγιο Αλέκτωρ στη διεύθυνση http://a-lektor.blogspot.gr

M of December
by Lưu Diệu Vân
Vagabond Press, 2016

Reading M of December is rather like going to a spectacular exhibition at a gallery where images of all kind swirl, proclaim, collide and re-form – the viewer takes the opportunity of a brief leave to attempt to come up with a coherent response. Having gone into this gallery, and exited on a number of occasions, what I have come up with is a response to the formed fragmentation of its individual poems, travelling through discordancy via the robust vigour of forceful lines and sharp elisions.

In the first section of the collection, ‘December’, individual poems read as constructed assemblages with dazzling juxtapositions of imagery. In ‘B.C. bees’, perception is presented as molten, contested, as chthonically and chronologically unsettled:

the fire has eyes that glide through lies
beyond B.C. and cunning centuries
the sage offers secrets to the universe
seeing is a plague
the distance between heaven and death is a U turn

The artist at work then makes a selection process by constructing a verbal installation:

each century’s special promotion
written in the DNA of people making headlines
the telling bees dash for the wedlocked bedrock
like thumbtacks on a topsoil cork board
sucking out stories as big as Vesuvius’ pumice
mortality preserves in conceding hives

This sense of poem as installation, or constructed artefact, is also on display in ‘micro exhibition’, where images of the artefact and that of the natural world play off each other, reflecting both boldness and uncertainty – wonderment in the faith of what the poet has created. The poem starts out with a strong image:

a religious artefact stands imposingly, sanctimoniously reflecting
the recondite sea beneath

The imposing nature of the image could be seen to conflate into the act of perception itself:

the glass incrustation patiently collects black and white
stones of uncertainty, downplays the six senses, magnifies the
perception

This culminates in the final verse, where the act of writing itself presents ambivalently:

on top of the mountain lays a hesitating temple of ink, half
wanting to leap, half keeping hold of subsistence
Essentially, Vân works herself out of hesitation; boldly placing the natural and the constructed to achieve a momentary interlocking of effect.

In ‘imaginary holy friend’, the robust somehow distils itself into an evocation of lyric, socially sanctioned violence. Here, the gendered de-formations of ‘people playing god’ merge into a joint reflection of the abused body and nature, with the short lines being particularly effec-tive:

god frolicking people
elongated neck binding
people playing god
moon-blade foot binding
slippers stumped by lotus ponds
punctured meat of the bony flute
meshes pain
filtered cries
hair side-parted
slope of decisiveness
gossamer crease hidden in plain terrain
mountain
goiter of the soil
lake
urethra of the deep
volcano
mouth of the inflamed
smoke
lung of the unsung

a favourite blacksmith of mortal parts
to play Operation with in the bedridden darkness
The poem ‘inside an armoured chrysalis’ pursues the vision of metaphysical clash in its expressionistic and apocalyptic tableau of war:

the cloak of war rips open like a caterpillar’s final grip on innocence
seas of poppies barrage from rising towers

Its imagery is strong and confrontational, for instance: ‘stench of fresh fir’, ‘molecules of gassed up bodies’ and ‘thinning polyskies of barebones and sulking skulls’. The delicacy (and the shorter line) seen in ‘imaginary holy friend’ effectively returns in the final two lines, playing out the metamorphic import of ‘chrysalis and caterpillar’:

the rest of us frantically disperse
in search of a butterfly that can cry

The section, ‘December’, continues with an enthralling juxtaposition of imagery from nature, the world of objects, and the body, all morphing into each other in unexpected combinations. ‘coiling forest’ presents a take on the Cinderella story, of ‘tales of a princess always needing rescues / of a prince.’ Vân portrays a set in motion, in which ‘a vanishing forest [is] coiling into itself’ and ‘doors are pushing upwardly silently within the forest like wild / mushrooms.’ The poet abruptly segues from this protean vision, into savage reflection:

Cinderella never made it
that last second of the forest’s final new year’s eve
when no one can own sadness
but merely takes care of it for the next victim in line

In a similar vein, ‘melancholia of caramel afternoons’ moves from the mythical to the contemporary with spectacular elision:

nirvana
the night’s cologne caging in
missing hinges from its macho wings
on the wall of memory
Sabrina arrives through the urgent ringtone

The second section of the collection, ‘M’ is akin to work seen in Poems of Lưu Diệu Vân, Lưu Mêlan & Nhã Thuyên (Vagabond Press, 2013), extending Vân’s poetry both in theme and imagery, nailing the acerbic line. ‘to a younger poet self’ and ‘naïve writer’ respectively look back in sardonic reappraisal: of, firstly, an early love affair; and, secondly, of early flurries onto the literary circuit. In ‘to a younger poet self’, the ‘Big Heartbreak’ is framed with literary reference:

all your twenty-two self-pities
a fatal infatuation for Rumi and e.e.cummings
insomnias yet of age
jolts of maiden pain
love smog tints grays of verses
laments vicariously postaged to Neruda

Its references morph into an effectively crafted take on writing and the body:

you shatter into creation
the feminist phoenix way
riding in the dark on the biro’s horn
rendering poisoned sensations savable
chastity’s optional to tame metaphors
you jump through a needle’s eye
avoiding the thread’s pull

‘naïve writer’ also sees the collection open itself up to some narrative savagery. In Vân’s view, literary PR appears as the selling of self, where ‘the writer’s skin must be as thick as their copious flows of / topless appearance on the fictional bed’, this ‘literary reception / bed, on which not a single space is deserted’, from which the speaker is suddenly excluded, ‘forever trapped outside’.

‘M’ explores the evolving world of feminist critique, drawing on history, culture and patriarchy, putting the poet’s skills at dramatic scene-setting to good effect. ‘feminine reconciliation’ reads as a pithy riff on popular magazines and their penchant for advice columns: ;what a woman wants is shoes that go with every mood / what she needs is an attitude that can wear many hats.’ In ‘the bindi escape’, a living deity leaves ritual behind:

12 days of purifying in isolation
she wipes the red sun
belated dreams off her charcoal-rimmed eyes
the spirit vacates the body
light escaping between her remoistenable thighs
two entities lie languidly
in the corona of midnight innocence
making bolts out of peepal with burgeoning tongues

the bindi’s making a scandalous cross
towards freedom

In ‘here comes the truth’ the rituals of a traditional upbringing are laid waste by sudden flight at the end of the Vietnam War, when the refrain of ‘White Christmas’ signalled the urgency to evacuate:
she was not privy to
the monk’s staged self-immolation
White Christmas and Bing Crosby’s common key
the entire village fumbling in the red land

The poem concludes with an epiphany of arrival in the United States, where the speaker ‘got all the answers from the immaculate self-cleaning airport toilets / no P. M. of W. C. forcing a tip from her.’

‘my would be sister’ reflects on this flight, and the alternative histories it represents. Growing up as ‘an au fait young woman’, she sees her home country as a place where ‘female laborers’ [sic] take ‘routine / beatings from their husbands like cultural norms.’ However, ‘if the night-sea escape had failed’ she might be, at 15, ‘prime age for pre-arranged marriage, lying leisurely on the hammock in the coconut grove.’

Another particularly strong poem in the collection, ‘on the 7thfloor’ skillfully employs the trope of a movie shot to suggest dark emotions within a contained and eroticised space – the theatre of the room:

the ceiling fan’s blades decapitate the plump moon of the 7th floor
flashes of light contaminate the eerie air
absolute silence
spirit possessed with an obvious sixth sense
a woman
plunging a needle through each fingernail
sewing a secret lover’s name on the inside of her longing thighs
without uttering a cry

Although issues of gender predominate in the second section of the collection, it is not an exclusive preoccupation. Among poems of a different timbre and subject, ‘the cloud hunter’ is a delightful, witty response to pareidoia, as the poem transforms from observations of cultural predilections: ‘the Vietnamese see a pixy dragon / the Chinese see a bad omen’, to being a somewhat rueful celebration of poetry:

I am proud of my trade regardless
protecting the hangover of our fading faction
there are so few of us left
surviving barely on the illicitly traded puff of time
and in order to avoid detection
we now call ourselves poets

Overall, this lively and impressive collection showcases feminist humour shaping the sharp cut of the poetic line. It sees Lưu Diệu Vân extending her range, and presenting a number of compelling poems, which invite rewarding re-reading.

*Jennifer Mackenzie is the author of Borobudur (Transit Lounge, 2009), republished in Indonesia as Borobudur and Other Poems (Lontar, 2012) and has been busy promoting it at festivals and conferences in Asia. She is now working on a number of projects, including an exploration of poetry and dance, ‘Map/Feet’. Her participation in the Irrawaddy Festival was supported by a writer’s travel grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.

**Taken from Cordite Poetry Review at http://cordite.org.au/reviews/mackenzie-van/