RETURN OF THE LONG TITLE
By John Davies
Jill Jones, The Mask and the Jagged Star (Hazard Press, 1992, $14.95)
P.R. Hay, The View From the Non-Members'Bar (Hazard Press, 1992, $14.95)
Margaret Diesendorf, Holding the Golden Apple (with a preface by Jacques Delaruelle, Phoenix Publications, 1991)
Jean Stone, Occasions for Comment (Red Rooster Press, 1992, limited edition obtainable from Young Street Poets, 70 Galston Road, Hornsby 2077, $8.90 includes postage)
Vera Newsom, The Apple and the Serpent (Hale & Iremonger, 1992, $14.95)
Christopher Kelen, The Naming of the Harbour & The Trees (Hale & Iremonger, 1992, $14.95)
Jill Jones chooses suburbia. This could almost be the title of her book. She writes "i have agreed with myself to be here" and inhabits her own poems as naturally as they nuzzle along the mounds and ridges of a familiar, everyday landscape. We go to work. Backwards and forwards. Sometimes we go by a slightly different route, just to be a devil.
Jill Jones is too good a poet though to let Sunday mornings, supermarkets, and vandalised telephone booths be a recipe for boredom. She knows that life is rarely as dull as we would like it to be. We can draw the curtains but we cannot hide. Normality is a barely balanced equilibrium of tensions. We yearn for silence and are haunted by the drone of lawn-mowers. We are tongue-tied
and we venture a small way only
towards telling real stories
and our timing is bad, especially when we try to tell our stories "in cars with the engine running". Within this apparent normality an aroused self may assert itself or begin to float away in confusion
walking down my path, i expect to meet myself
hanging around the front door,
a refugee on the verandah, pale face and misleading eyes
which leads, at best, to some kind of epiphany in the kitchen. Even there you may discover "the coffee had already/packed its bags and gone".
Friends and loved ones must be warned against a complacency they think they have earned.
Next year I'll remember,
you take black, one sugar, but don't tell me,
don't sympathise, don't make me laugh, don't pat me,
don't become
somebody else to forget someday.
In "The Administration of Winter", among others, Jones treats the poetry of our daily working lives. Is anything easier there? Unfortunately not. In offices "you dream of limbo, you dream of voodoo", surrounded by "thin young men who make decisions and throw no shadows".
When not jogging our memory of familiar rooms and landscapes and situations she is capable of a surrealist sprint, as in "Trying to steal the myth of lawns and fences", which features tame cockroaches playing piano accordions, radioactive toothbrushes, and a boat made "of feathers and small stones and flutes".
This is a rewarding book by a poet who knows it is a poet's job to define "a language for each morning, like this one".
Stalin believed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. As we know from the lists of those who, shall we say, did not outlive him, he did not like the competition.
There is little fear of similar reaction in the happy democracy of Tasmania where Peter Hay has thrived to produce his first collection. Politicians are good fellows down there. Hay himself has been welcomed to their inner chambers, at one time serving as senior private secretary to the Minister for Environment and Planning. Hay is a noted and still active environmentalist in a state which has often led the rest of Australia in that cause.
His experience and concerns are explicit in many of these poems. His insight into the political process takes us very close to the compromising wonderland familiar to television viewers of "Yes, Minister":
The local member strides toward the future
With sure purpose,
Mistakes are granted
These are mutual and in the past
And no cause for a corroding guilt...
He saves us from decisions,
Deflates the complex,
Banishes doubt.
Blunts the horns of courage and cowardice.
His re-election is assured.
Reflective souls yearn for great decisions and great planning. In action they discover equally passionate souls whose ideas about those decisions and plans contradict their own. Compromise and disappointment are inevitable. Aspiration is, literally, our breath, and we cannot deny breath to others unless we choose the Stalin school of conflict-management.
Even happy democracy has its human fallout, as in "Vincent Gets Out of Politics":
"A funny thing about politics" (his eyes swept the span
Of the battling years), "A funny bloody thing,
I've always said like y'meet the best blokes a man
Cd want in politics, and y'meet the biggest frigging
Pack of mongrels too: best and worst, I dunno why."
I am not aware of another poet who has been so well-placed or so willing to treat this aspect of our lives. We can be grateful to Hay for his view from the Non-Members' bar.
We can also be grateful for his invention of Mrs. Nobrains, the ideal consumer. I hope she will appear in later poems.
The near disappearance of love poetry is one of this century's most peculiar achievements. For several thousand years a loaf of bread and a jug of wine etcetera provided ample inspiration for bards and troubadors. In our time technology has given the troubadors microphones. Entrepreneurs gave them film and recording contracts. Fashion, fame, and money took over the love market.
With the coming of the First World War many serious poets simply hurled themselves into the madness of Dada. Others became politically aware and wrote about life in factories. T.S. Eliot (the hijacker of poetry, as William Carlos Williams called him) ran with it down rats' alley and bobbed up again in another war as the Buddha of East Coker and Little Gidding, freed from desire. In all directions the "great relation" of men and women seemed to be forgotten as a likely subject.
Margaret Diesendorf's Holding the Golden Apple is a book of love poems. There is no distraction here, no wandering into social guilt, no agenda, no theory or ism, no sexual politics. We are back to you and me and the old loaf and jug. She wants the whole loaf and a full jug, without reservations. She says "let your faith in me be absolute".
I am the spear in your side -
do not pull me out: This spear
has made of you a hero.
Such traditional imagery is reinforced by the photograph on the cover of a Greek statue dated to 520-510BC. This is the oldest topic of conversation and the latest.
Morning,
my feet ache with the need of loving
you.
I have a dancer's feet,
narrow, arched & spirited:
they urge for the corporeal dance,
to feel you, stroke you...&
sometimes threaten
to trample you
with pony hooves.
There's more tenderness
in my feet
than in the hands
of a hundred wives.
The lack of complaint in these poems is notable. One sequence is subtitled "Cupid the Torturer" but Diesendorf's tone is not angry. She is not writing to start an argument, or to finish one. We lose someone, we separate, our love is not fully returned. "I offered all my heart/he wanted only half". These things happen. She suggests, generously by some standards, that "our union in this love/wipes out all hatred".
In this book she is doing much to wrench poetry back to a centre where we meet and try to be ourselves together.
or else
Love will enter the glass dome
of the museum artefact.
Love poetry is too important a form to be ceded to troubadors with recording contracts.
Jean Stone died while Occasions for Comment was being published. The presentation of this volume, a limited edition in red hardcover and blue jacket would, we can hope, have pleased her. She says in her own foreword that her "greatest interests have always been in reading, writing and collecting books both for my own and my husband Walter Stone's collections".
These poems, written since the formation of the Young Street Poets group in 1979, reflect a long life and memory, and an attractive gift for understatement as the feather-light, almost offhand, title implies. Of course there is a kind of understatement that comes from having little to say. Stone's is the thinking kind, deliberately restrained. There are four overt haiku in the collection and the other poems nearly all have the flavour and brevity of that form. Look at the beginning of "Talking Heads":
"I won't hesitate", she said,
"If there is talk of marrying".
On the hot dry ground
The shadow of a bird
fell like a bracket opening
an unexpected phrase.
That is getting down to business. In a prose poem she writes of handling "words carefully like $500 notes". The care shows throughout.
There is sly humour in "Horse-Sense". A woman finds, at last, a perfect knight on horseback outside her window. Unfortunately the horse becomes nervous and gallops off with him
before she can get up
from pillows wet with tears
sheets twisting, tearing.
The window's always open.
He has only to reach through.
Will he return? Ask the horse.
"The Emigrants" is an affectionate reminiscence of her father and his twin brother:
One Sunday as children we were fascinated
watching our fathers unpacking silver, china, glass
that had been Grandma's. Sets were divided;
one brother took a decanter, the other matching tumblers
and so on piece by piece in the fairest way
the verandah shaded from the Queensland sun.
Though there is an occasional darker note in these pages the "fairest way" is the key to Jean Stone's poetry, to her world and the way she observed it.
Vera Newsom's second collection contains a number of poems addressed to or suggested by other poets. I counted twelve. In one a mist seen among trees reminds her of something she has read in Robert Gray. This is no doubt flattering to Robert Gray but a referential approach rather weakens the immediacy and intensity of both her experience and the language used to convey it. A referential approach also detracts from the self-contained wholeness of a poem and its accessibility to a reader. The result is one-legged poetry, poems with one arm tied behind their back, a card not laid squarely on the table.
In "How Many Poems" she reflects on the number of poems she has not written. Edifying for her, perhaps, but hardly a comfort to an impatient reader. It is followed by a poem addressed to Montale. Two pages later "I Am Not Ready Yet" offers an alarming prospect.
The book does lift off a little with a series of modest but direct poems about children, colts and calves, friends, a tremendous number of roses, daffodils, hydrangeas, daisies, violets, and fallen leaves. There is also much rippling on water.
When the book really lifts off it is as if another writer has taken over the controls.
My own dogmas
I would refute.
They have made me angry.
This is a voice to sit up and listen to, not at all like the other voice which relies so much on fairly standard natural and seasonal imagery.
It's time words troubled the silence (p.60)
To work my way to a new beginning -
try one stratagem, and then another (p.56)
In your mind I am still moored in a backwater.
What if I suddenly weigh anchor? (p.70)
I have put you aside, the loved and the unloved,
the alive, the half-alive, the creditors and the debtors -
I am not interested in love's accounts, or those old debts
we all owe one another (p.30)
The persona here is restive, ready for action, chafing between contradictions, braced for a blow and forcing on, head down.
Reading Christopher Kelen's first collection is like reading a newspaper. Test cricket, the national anthem, timber industry, unemployed, property developers, a marijuana raid, bushfires, all flicker past your eye mingled with fragments of popular song, nursery rhymes, and advertising slogans. This method is considered playful by some, but whether you call it that or cut-up or kaleidoscope or collage or by another name there is a cumulative glibness in it. The mass of detail is out of proportion to the occasional deft effect, as when he writes of "iced Volvos" in the carpark of a ski resort. You wonder if the small joke is worth squeezing out.
There is another risk in this method. Consider these thirteen lines:
I see them in the cafeteria.
They take themselves seriously
From a dark veldt of suburb they come
beat back the outposts of reason
From sparseness to dull themselves
they come with the auditor's grey ethic
From the blow-drier belt above the rail line
a dry warmth after lunch where the weather's nice
Their breath is teflon
a mist to degrease the morning
In an ideal world
their masochism leaves them as unviable
as the abolition of beaches.
Glibness leads easily to condescension. Here even the blow-driers are morally ambiguous. An auditor's ethic is automatically grey and by implication his (or her, and, by the way, which auditor?) human decency questionable. Enjoying a good lunch on a fine day becomes sinister, which must be a surprise to most readers and certainly to other poets. Any suburb is a sparse dark place of unreason. Residents of such suburbs have, obviously, suspect breath and are masochists, and are probably implicated in moves to abolish or close public beaches. The latter is a startlingly lateral proposition to say the least. These people are "unviable".
It is on that last contemptuous word that Kelen's occasional gift for an interesting phrase founders. His cartoon-collage method is a potentially useful net but it has rather large holes in it which too often let logic, irony, tolerance, compassion, empathy, slip through. It is a disdainfully clever net which rarely catches pain, or doubt, anxiety, the tug of loyalty, or indeed a single urgent belief or moment. When he asks
Should I watch TV
or talk to you
or both
or do some colouring in?
it is difficult to believe that anyone would wait for the answer.
Southerly Vol. 53 No. 1 March 1993