Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 individual and communal. Unlike
him, she does not have a dialect that stands strongly against the usual domestic (as opposed to public) code of the oppressor.
Her solution is to pare back. As her style matures it becomes simpler, more anecdotal, less ambitious. She wants the facts, not the words, to speak. She wants to record her unadorned voice. Perhaps this leads too many individual pieces to sound chatty, or like the quick jottings of journal entries. Though even these—collectively—give a faceted portrait.
As we read through chronologically we see her accept the shrinking of her range. Affection, never untroub- led by loss or betrayal, produced some of the most moving and complex of her earlier poems. But now, she has given up on romantic passion. One of the new poems makes ironic comment on, "The perfect relationship." It reveals an attitude that finds as much comfort in lack of contact and lack of expectation, and meditates on the prolongation of a chaste kiss brought about by the lingering taste of curry.
At their best, the new poems convey clear, easily accessible clusters of images. Sometimes these have the playful vividness of haiku, though with rather more metaphor and explanation. Where the poems fail is where the voice of the poet is contaminated—as one's everyday
voice tends to be—by common sense and cliche. There are still too many tired metaphorical expressions and too much opinion. The alcohol level is not always high enough, for us to laugh and fall down dead of the truth.
Rebecca Edwards
DON'T PLAY GAMES, I WANT TO BE WOKEN UP
Mal Morgan, Out of the Fast Lane, Five Islands Press, 1998
R.A. Simpson, The Impossible and Other Poems, Five Islands Press, 1998 Deb Westbury, Surface Tension, Five Islands Press, 1998
Jordie Albiston, The Hanging of Jean Lee, Black Pepper, 1998
Ouyang Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, Wild Peony, 1997
Many poems in Out of the Fast Lane are addressed to Morgan's friends and acquaintances, most of them famous in the literary world. This sort of name-dropping can be dreary, and the easy, intimate tone becomes an excuse for slackness in poems such as
"Homonculus": "safeway/ is not a poem/ the op-shop/ is not a poem,/
too commercial."
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There are some stunning images:
"Vincent/ painted a sky/ wilder than the sea/ and stars/ that cut you up."
(Pale Sea of Blue Glass). There are also some that are too soupy for my taste. "1 Come to Your Body," is an overspiced love poem in which Morgan's perception of a woman's enjoyment of sex seems fairly unenlightened: "1 come to your body like a white page,/ full of me."
The title declares its intent: Italian cheese, yin rouge, a medium steak, and, to add piquancy, an antipasto of "hearts that can be/ mashed/ like dark red! plums" (A Woman Paints My Portrait). I wouldn't mind less roses, more mash.
R. A. Simpson's The Impossible and Other Poems has a couple of very fine poems (Paranoia, With Medea's Fury), and many great ideas which aren't quite realised into great poetry. All too often, prose rhythms are clipped into frustratingly dull lines: "Thinking of squeezing a violin/ into a little glass of water/ is simply/ seeing the impossible" (The Impossible). There's something lacking, everything is too safe, and Simpson seems reluctant to step away from poetic convention- particularly in his opening lines: "I recall a night" (Portrait on Water), "I found a torn photo" (School Photo:
1941), "Idle on the Bridge" (Familiars).
Even "The dog is dreaming bones"
(Backyard) is not, on a second reading, a very surprising or engag- ing opening.
Like Morgan, Simpson knows how to make a poem sound like poetry. More than craftmanship though, what I expect, what I need, from a poet in his late sixties, is depth of experience, a richness of perception, propelled by the willingness to take risks. In "The House of Judgement," Simpson begins to delve into the big un- answerables—is there a saviour? is anyone judging humanity? why is god felt only as an absence?—but he shies away too soon. "Drawing from Shadows" opens a dark, ambiguous space: "Nothing before/ and nothing after/ these four study walls," but it's not until "A Cardinal Talks to Caravaggio" that Simpson finally reveals what he is capable of. This tight masterpiece prickles with icy lust, and the greed of its last lines is breathtaking.
The Hanging of Jean Lee, by Jordie Albiston, is a re-creation of certain pivotal incidents in the life of the last woman to be hanged in Australia. Lee's voice develops, in the rhythms of 40s swing, from an earnest four year-old, to soldier's good-time girl, to hardened prostitute capable of murder. The steady, journalistic inevitability is broken, powerfully, by Lee's cry to the God who has forsaken her: "I will teach Him the scriptures from inside of me"
(Dear Diary 1934).
There is nothing moralistic about Albiston's unfurling of Lee's char- acter. Why, and how, she became hardened enough to stub out cigarettes in an old man's chest, is
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Volume 25, number 2, October 1998 hinted at, rather than imaginatively
"explained." This left me unsatisfied on the first reading. I wanted Albiston to dive in, away from "the facts," to make a solid if fictional connection between an early and a later event. When I went back to the book a second time, however, I found that it simply flowed, that everything was right; the slightly jangly rhythms, the shifts between newspaper reportage and Lee's voice, the juxtaposition of "past"
(Lee's childhood and youth) and
"now" (her imprisonment and execution). The seamless narrative opens to explore, with great subtlety, Lee's development as both recipient and perpetrator of atrocities in a place and time which failed to "handle her with care" (see
"School Report [ 19281").
I am grateful for Albiston's restraint, for the delicate sense of timing with which she places a poem like "In Defence of the Working Girl" very soon after "Dear Diary (1941)." This is a book that will "make its mark,"
in a more positive sense than its subject.
By comparison, Deb Westbury's Surface Tension is somewhat patchy.
There are some excellent poems: the pain and beauty of "Wrapt," the sense of impending grief in "The Night Before": "It was a mistake/ to go down to the sea/ where every abandoned castle/ is my lonely breast." "Whalespotting" sounded better when I heard it on Radio National a few years ago, but it is
still an original, powerful vision of a woman wrestling with ancient trauma inside the living cave, "the whale of [her]self."
"Door," with its contrast between archetype (the body silhouetted against an open doorway) and modern physics "my body... no more/ than water and stardust/ held/
in a pattern of light" is far more satisfying than a merely pretty poem, like "Winter Fruit." There's some ugly prose chopped up into short lines (especially "Confucius at the Rock Sung Restaurant") and a few serious mistakes that don't belong in a first, let alone a third, collection. In "Homing," for exam- ple, the flesh on a dead pelican confusingly appears/disappears in the same image.
I mistrust writers who doubt both their poems' efficacy and their readers' intelligence by adding footnotes. They detract from excel- lent poems, (death in thirroul/ the cleaner's story), whilst adding nothing to mediocre ones (meditat- ion with cloud and waterbird). In
"death in thirroul," the context makes it very clear that "harpo" is Brett Whiteley; sticking a footnote right under the last line just hurts the eyes;
There are too many lines, in too many poems—including the opening Beach Suite—which are not strung taut enough; meaning wobbles and dives into the sand before striking a true note. More tension, please.
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Ouyang Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, is crude, vicious, overtly polit- ical, and downright nasty about Australia: "people are so quiet and content/ they live and love in a sleep kind of way! ... children are enormous animals that never grow up!... nothing happens" (No. 5). The Poet (and in this distinctly post- modern text he is/is not Ouyang Yu) hates China "let's compose this last song of our twilight civilization/ on the stinking feet just unbound" (No.
78), and hates his new country even harder. The book is an angry struggle to tear down structures in an alien language; it stinks with sexual/intellectual/spiritual frustration, but it is also desperately beautiful:
the spring is on display from the flowers of dark trees
and the birds even sing in the gas fireplace
this poet now is contemplating his next round of bullets
one at a time at himself
while singing his last song of a spring
that has no spring in it (No. 72)
Some parts of the sequence are outrageously funny, others scathing:
"these poets live/ less like the snow than the frost/ that thinly covers the morning grass!... leaving the transient chill in the bone" (No. 54).
With sustained and savage bril- liance Ouyang Yu takes Australian idiom and forces it to explode complacency wide open. He com- bines an Aussie name like "lex" with
a sense of conversation with the Word itself (No. 47), he makes "good on them" into a withering curse (No.
50), he takes our/his best epithet and does this: "in the next century or so/
let's kill all the editors/and publish from headtop/ now you want minimalism/ you dickhead/ that's what you can minimalize yourself into" (No. 84).
There is only one blindspot—a big one—the concept of Aboriginal civilization (in a spiritual, if not material sense) is simply not addres- sed: "you can't get a mayan an egyptian a greek a roman an indian a chinese civilization from the middle of australia/ nor anywhere on the coast" (No. 8). Perhaps this is the only appropriate response for a
"resident alien," but if you're going to dig into that particular wound these days you need to find some- thing more than terra nullius.
Any book as important as this will have its fldws. By its very nature it renders the poet extremely vulner- able. Ouyang Yu is willing to enter the dangerous spaces, where poetry becomes a source of real power, rather than just another game. It might even wake us up.
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