Helen Hagemann
When receiving poetry collections for
review, I generally research online to find other reviews in order to
gauge that particular reader’s response. In this instance I was not
disappointed to find several written by most noteworthy academics,
including Edric Mesmer from the University of Buffalo USA, and Antonia
Pont a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Professional and Creative
Writing at Deakin University. Both writers appraised the work in an
in-depth, contemporary and erudite way. Pont felt obligated as a
reviewer to mine the work for its narrative / aesthetic arc and themes,
while Mesmer explored its tethering muliebrity. Muliebrity! Wattison’s
word in her description of 1950s women. (32)
While I agree with other reviewers that Terra Bravura
is a difficult book to read (perhaps it’s the esoteric phraseology), I
tend to explore the poetry from the personal point of view (the lyric
‘I’) often looking for a grassroots, emotional engagement. As I wended
my way through its rather dense 140 pages, Wattison’s epilogue
on the last page caught my eye. Whether this is a single poem or an
addendum to the work does not matter. Here is a charitable look at an
aging father with dementia that we come to know in this family auto /
biography in verse.
I show him photographs I have had made from some of his slides. He doesn’t recognise my mother on a beach from their honeymoon, but then the placename brings forward a memory of being there, years earlier, and watching a nudist, wearing only a towel draped around her neck, walk from her cottage every morning down onto the beach for a swim, then she’d walk back. “You could set your watch by her”, he says, grinning.Lately he has begun to wake distressed, looking for “it” – “Where is it?” He doesn’t know what “it” is. Only that it is lost.Only that it is lost and also there, like a woman walking and melting into the sea, at regular intervals, 60 years ago, and now, with fondness. (136)
Poets and their fathers have been a major
connecting subject in poetry, from Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings,
Robert Bly, Robert Burns, and César Vallejo, to name just a few. Poems
about fathers by their poet daughters are even more interesting and
Freudian linked. Anne Sexton’s poem “‘Daddy’ Warbucks” reveals a
subliminal subservience to a powerful father, while Sylvia Plath’s
“Daddy” reveals the father as a vampire and a Nazi who tortures and
attacks her individuality. Gale Swiontkowski in her study of Sexton and
Plath writes that both poets use the word “Daddy” as opposed to “Father”
to show a familiar affection and need, while undermining and
challenging the patriarchal and hierarchal structure of “Father” as head
of the household. In the Oedipal dilemma, both daughters are “compelled
to defer their position as victim to escape the subordinate role … as
with their enduring mothers” (Swiontkowski 2003, 27–28). It is through
poetry that Sexton and Plath form a controlled and creative response to
the affluent and powerful, but destructive and predatory father
(Swiontkowski 2003, 29).
Wattison’s poetry, although a dense and
obscure narrative, nevertheless deals in part with the archetypal
relationship of father and daughter. For the purpose of empowering, not
victimising herself, Wattison moves away from confessional poetry
towards the symbolic and if not actual, to an equality of father and
daughter through the mystical power of poetic language – “I do not tire of this combative bloom … he tilts at the enemy / I am not it” (38–39).
There is a candid nothing of our dynamic.
We are graduating foreground
to a flowering azalea. (115)
…
The father-eating folktale
is a solarised crop
of subject and infinity. (116)
…
This time he waves
as I appear through the gate
as though I wouldn’t see him,
a fluttering poplar, standing
in the garage,
Ach, du, Daddy (119) (“after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’”)
Throughout the work, the poet conveys her
empowerment by using various memes such as intertextual and artistic
references, authors’ quotes, and symbolic ants, swans, mice, chickens,
dogs, cow and fox. The fox appears symbolic and similar to Ted Hughes’
“The Thought-Fox”, that is, “the animal’s body as invisible, but which
feels its way forward nervously in the dark”. This might also be that
stalking presence (or it may be real!). Nevertheless, using an analogy
of “aloneness / to have no other in view” from Jennifer Rutherford’s The Gauche Intruder, this “being” in the poem appears predatory.
It slowly slunk towards me, weaving low,
eyes at a distance, fixed.
I have seen it before,
it has stood at a distance,
now it sits at my feet rocking, squinting,
leaning its shoulders into my legs,
throwing its head into my hands.
(What to do with such threat?
I am painfully awkward,
What to do?
It smells of grassfire and soil,
Its eyes running, closed.
It demands intimacy.) (75)
There are bursts of emotional relevance in Terra Bravura.
Wattison’s “Daddy” becomes a victim of old age and dementia and the
poet becomes beneficent. The father, as muse, can and will inspire her
creative mission.
At 80,
he is deafened and seduced
by the brutal world of women.
He will not speak of Martha
or point to her in photographs.
He likes to give sprays of orchids
to women as they leave –
…
This delicate flamboyance
which evolves from orchis,
orkhis,
“testicle”. (55)
In this family history there is a complex
descendant line fraught with problems. When the poet searches out the
grave of her grandmother, Johanna Elizabeth Martha Kalisch, a dominance
and violence is engendered on both sides.
I try to fathom her
in her burst knuckled,
Pre-Raphaelite,
predestinate
terra bravura.
The hint of red in my hair
is hers.
Infamous for grotesque maternal punishments
spoken of only as interrupted,
shocking jokes;
their punch lines plaintive.
Her brutalised son,
his brutalised son. (12)
And of Martha (mother/stepmother?)
I am descended
from half-mad women.
Women who raged
and languished,
took back
grains of wheat
from ants,
sprang to unconscionable violence.
…
I think of the inflective slurring
of the junkie at my door,
crying at my misunderstanding
of her question,
her simple request,
her defeated apologies. (15)
While this book is an archaeological dig
into the past and the woes of the present, I felt rewarded after my
reading for its contemporary relevance of family baggage (something we
all own), as well as its experimental array of images and metaphors, for
example: “Whoever named this wild mountain a cradle / knew the tilt of
it (75). And almost a Steinism: “A photo of my mother / and her sisters /
and their mother / and her sisters / and their daughters / and their
mother / in 1960” (32).
For those looking for a more accessible
work of lyric poetry this volume may disappoint. However, I believe many
female poets who wish to write about taboo subjects such as incest,
family abuse, miscarriage, social inheritance, gender power and control,
and so on, might take several leaves out of Sharon Olds’ works. She
offers erudite and masterly poetics into the controversial subjects that
mostly affect women.
Terra Bravura certainly covers
the brave territory of family archetypes, albeit challenging to compose
them clearly. This is my only criticism as I would have liked to know
more about these characters, especially the stumbling presence of Martha
(19). This work may stump any beginner reader of poetry, and as for
this reviewer, unfortunately it has been a difficult passage to
understand a very interesting, complex family.
References
Rutherford, J. (2000). The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press.
Swiontkowski, G. (2003). Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy. Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press.
Webster, R. (2002). “‘The Thought Fox’ and the Poetry of Ted Hughes”. The Critical Quarterly (1984) http://www.richardwebster.net/tedhughes.html
Helen Hagemann grew up
in New South Wales and now lives in Perth, Western Australia. She holds
an MA in Writing from Edith Cowan University and teaches prose at the
Fremantle Arts Centre. Helen has been an Australian Society of Authors
mentorship award winner, also a Varuna Longlines Poetry Award recipient
with her collection Evangelyne & Other Poems published by the Australian Poetry Centre in 2009. Her second collection of Arc & Shadow was published by Sunline Press in 2013
Bonny
Cassidy, Final Theory. Artarmon, New South Wales: Giramondo, 2014. ISBN
978-1-922146-61-8
Theories have been around for centuries. It was first thought that the world was flat,
until Galileo proved the Copernican theory that the earth did actually revolve
around the sun. Recently I purchased nail polish called Color Theory, and per
se, was offered Bonny Cassidy’s latest collection titled Final Theory. In this
work of free verse two main stories are evoked, but more importantly the poetry
centres on the theory of “finalities”. Theory. There are several meanings to
the word: abstract reasoning, speculation, an assumption based on limited
information, a belief or principle that guides action or assists comprehension
or judgement, even the branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory
statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to
practice. Head spinning!
Well, this
is how I felt after reading Final Theory.
The
collection is divided into four parts and appears as four distinct narratives,
each separate page without a title. Before outlining the content of this poetry,
it is important to understand that the disastrous worlds that Cassidy captures
in these episodes are written from an interrogative stance. It is certainly not
lyric poetry, but more post-avant. As Adam Fieled (2006) writes “post-avant
poetry is distinguished from other forms of ‘po-mo’ by its deliberate shying
away from the directly ‘personal’, as well as its engagement with ‘morally
motivated abstraction’”.
Did I write
abstraction? Yes. Most of this collection is fairly abstract. However, it is
for a reason. The post-avant poet’s main aim is to avoid the lyric “I” and as
Fieled (2006) writes, “the poet employs ‘Negative Capability’ to express
contradictions and oppositions, harmonies and discords, without affixing his or
her identity to any fixed locale”. We do know however, after several readings
of each section, that Cassidy’s finalities (harmonies and discords) exist
somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in New Zealand, Tasmania, Antarctica, and
possibly the ancient Gondwana. (This information is gleaned from Cassidy
receiving a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and her trips to these
areas).
It is
tempting to delve deeper into this collection in order to understand the
literal level of the poetry. However, in the light of the above that we are
dealing with post-avant poetry, this is not possible. Instead, I am tackling
this review by looking at each of the four sections in terms of binaries.
They are:
birth / death – aesthetic / catastrophic – factual / mythical, with varying
rhizomes.
In the
foreword, these images set the tone for what is to come:
A camera tracks the ocean floor
(eating images, not colliding). And rests.
…
A child plunges headlong into that valley
scuttling crud.
The camera is her dream tunnel. …
(1)
On the
previous page, there is a quote from Lionel Fogarty’s “Scenic Wonders – We
Nulla Fellas”: “Ranges and countless channels uninhabited’ /… ‘cones / knives,
volcanoes borning a surface external / wave, rock over arid plains are not far
from our base.” From Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen’s, How The Universe Will End,
this quote appears: “Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening forever… on
the long road from order to disorder.” Now we have some inkling of where this
is going!
In Section
1, expect to be transported to the aftermath of New Zealand’s earthquake in the
south island, possibly Christchurch and its surrounds.
Bucking
under
distant melt
[…]
an envelope of land
is opened and warm-skinned
cold-blooded ocean welling.
(14)
What is at
stake here is the morality / immorality binary of this catastrophe. The land
has been corrupted, as Cassidy writes, “see the little bastard coming to the
fray. / An inkling child of oil and grit” (14). Yet, the “day glows” and on
Steven’s Island the scene is inviolate:
… wren,
piopio, huia, saddleback, kokako,
short-tailed bat, long-tailed bat –
who opened a gap and thudded through,
back-first.
The place became
a host of wings, a fall of parrots. …
(16)
Section II
diverts from the disaster caused by nature and the ultimate survival of the
natural world. In some way we are carried forward (or is it back to Gondwana?)
to where in “some future ocean our beloved proteins will / roll, perhaps
finding one another, linked / by a theoretical wave” (18). At a guess, the
binary in this section is either “obliteration / creation”, “or birth / death.”
A child is involved and the poetry is mythical, strange, she comes:
face to face with a rubber alligator
then wheels, seeing
the alligator dissolve as she grows:
byproduct, polymer-spun
and grasping.
(21)
The setting
of the ocean with its water flowers and flushing weed is metaphorical. Cassidy
appears to re-create the child’s life as a life saved and lived in water. It’s
a slow letting go, but death is lengthened, perhaps not realised, until:
… they’ve clustered on a corpse she
snatches
at the crowd, fills her mouth, cancelling
their fuss
with her fried tongue.
But in the landscape of her head
one lives on …
(28)
Section III
introduces another landscape that hints of isolation but, more to the point, of
being slightly inhabited / uninhabitable: “try to make its faces out: they’re
deserted” (39).
Swerving from the valley’s head
pipes cascade silently
and divert
to a compound buried in slick white rock.
(43)
The two
people in the narrative, rather than being “in the detritus of the old
harbours” (6), are on “high ground” staring across a valley and in “one of the
cars some kids / amped their dying stereo / so it shone across the valley”
(39–40).
A biplane lifted from its beach and wiped
up light.
[…]
The lake rose, floating
on the valley
then deepened to a stop.
Sailing peaks.
(40)
In Section
IV, we return to the child / girl, although the “she” point-of-view of
water-baby or survivor is unclear. However, certain aspects of the binary of
factual / mythical are evident in this final poetry. The setting of caves, the
ocean, the rift of ice, and “on the surface: canisters, their reels of
punctured weed” (67), “the plastics she has loved” (66), appear as evidence to
the aftermath of a previous disaster or catastrophe. The “she” person in the
poetry also has an affinity with and appears to be floating in this fallible
landscape.
Rummaging the hadal scum
she rips white clams from their roots
and sifts with toothless gums.
(69)
We could
hardly believe that this character / child or super woman would be human,
surviving hours below the sea, being flung high to a cliff face, and then have
her “bellows grind through avenues of the last ice” (70). One supposes she is
likened to a mythical character, similar to the Greek sea-goddess Thetis who
had the power to change her shape at will.
Nose to sloppy ice
she gnaws –
a line draws itself
across her head
and silently folds
inward:
the thin zones inch
she rises
involuntary
(70–71)
Apart from the obscure nature of this radical poetry, it must be mentioned that the work has a foray of excellent poetic techniques: strong rhythm, imbibed tone, powerful imagery, a picturesque view of the natural world, a motif of photography (as real / made-up images) and unforgettable phrases such as: “to understand why the ocean ends / here. Drinking from the teeth / of the cliff” (25) and “down the rift / (past a rusted box, its long eye gazing into sludge)” (67). Final Theory might not be for all, especially lovers of lyric poetry, but for those who like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, post-modernist, experimental or post-avant poetry, it’s a challenging read.
Reference
Fieled, A
(2006) “Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Abstract Morality in Post-Avant Poetry”.
Cordite Poetry Review (30 June).
http://cordite.org.au/features/adam-fieled-rachel-blau-duplessis-and-abstract-morality-in-post-avant-poetry/
Honey & Hemlock
by
Julie Watts
This is a poet who sees
the world in very physical terms and is enraptured by colour. Watts is a
poet after D H Lawrence’s own heart, finding contemporary actions and
events aligned with archetypal forces and our beings as genetically
determined. The title comes from one of many powerful poems about her
mother and father suffering in old age. Dennis Haskell
HELEN HAGEMANN'S REVIEW:
Honey & Hemlock by Julie Watts (Sunline Press, 2013)
I’m commencing this review with a quote from Gertude Stein who said, it is so very much more exciting and satisfactory for everybody if one can have contemporaries, if all one’s contemporaries could be one’s contemporaries. As a member of the same OOTA writing group and also a friend, I come to this review as Julie Watts' contemporary. Therefore, as a poet and reviewer it is much more exciting and satisfactory for me to highly praise this debut collection of poems from that premise. I also agree with two other reviewers, Les Wicks Rochford St, Review and Dennis Haskell (The West Australian); the latter seeing the modernist view of form and feeling, aligning her text with “D H Lawrence’s own heart, finding contemporary actions and events aligned with archetypal forces and our beings as genetically determined.” Wicks on the other hand states that the book is “even more enriched by the gift of her language… the way she enlivens these themes.” Again, more words from the wise. “Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually—that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too— but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.” Muriel Rukeyser (The Life of Poetry) So in this context, it seems to me, a lot of contemporary Australian poetry is heading into the post post-modernist vein which is often devoid of feeling as the language works only on a literal level, and doesn’t delve into that deeper metaphorical framework. Honey & Hemlock brings satisfaction to the reader because of the complexities of emotion and relationships that the poet is conveying. It reaches into that subterranean area we know as “the mind/heart” binary. In her poem When Father Hit the Dog,tension builds in the closing of the tea-towel drawer. When father hit the dog for digging up the garden mother, folding tea towels, flicked him and undercut of a glance and said, you shouldn’t do that – females never forget later when the dog shrank from his touch she mutely closed the tea towel drawer nice and tight. There are all kinds of shared distinctions in this work. Clusters of events, family pets, the poet strolling into the natural world; birds are prominent, colour is pictorial, and the sea obviously holds a special place for the author. In Girl on the Jetty there is motion and tenderness in the gaze: Legs off-key and thrashing slicing through the shifting afternoon hip to heel and pumping that briny air for all its pungency In Seagulls Sleeping , images of birds, their ‘shoulders of wing / and eyes, minute black lines / drawn on white / canvas’ are juxtaposed with a distant similarity of ‘black dots - / children on the stairs.’ Poignant and heartfelt, the poems about Watts’ mother and father send a message most of us can share about aging parents. From Mother, ‘knees drawn up / tight against your chest / your eyes – lost discs / wandering…..if I could give you your time back…you would drop / your knees and your / wandering.’ And from Putting Hand Cream on my Father 94 , ‘His hands are pale leaves / clamouring for the sun / quivering for touch.’ Some images are irresistible and should not be left out of any review. ‘The viridian thrusts / of lavender purple-nibbed’ After the Eye Injury ‘The marching communes of ants’ ‘And the strumming bees / missionaries in the stamens’ And Everyday is Sunday There are many more great lines and poems in the sweet reveal of Honey & Hemlock. You can purchase this book from Sunline Press and at all leading bookstores. It’s a collection to keep dipping into over and over, but pardon the pun, like a bee into pollen. Helen Hagemann Copyright (c) 2013 |
