are rubbed our flanks have the gift of sand
tongues.
(p. 75) Flying appears to cause an immediate sense of stress, in the title poem (p. 53), restated in "Aeroplane" (p. 13), and summed up neatly when "The elastic twangs/ right back to ground. Rebound."
("Rebound" p. 52). With the consciousness of ageing, however, Shap- cott explores a more challenging sense of the stress of travel:
Like wheatseeds out of a Nile tomb the stored relics shoot
as soon as they are brought into the light and send nerve roots
deep into the alive brain.
I cannot sleep.
"Museum Insomniac" (p. 37)
JOAN DAVIS
REVIEW
Michael Sariban, A Formula For Glass, University of Queensland Press, 1987. $7.95 (paper) 103 pp.
and all the words that never found words surrender without a fight I capitulate at the edge of a painting, I am swallowed by the frame
And he is ravenous for more
"Monet In Black & White" p. 73
The poems of Michael Sariban in A Formula For Glass are characte- rised by this verbal energy which urges the reader to a variety of locations in place and experience. Childhood, in Berlin, is revisited in the first section. In "Returning," the reality of meeting again the father, after years of not knowing, is captured deftly:
the afternoon tips back like an hourglass I am history book and camera I am my father's diary but the day he was here eludes me it's clear I've had my best chance
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"Olympia-Stadion, Berlin.
For Alexander Sariban, 1906-1985" p. 15-16 Here, also, the reader is introduced to the woman to whom the collection is dedicated. Her meeting, and interaction with the father "Notes for my father IV", prefigure the loss of both. After Berlin, Sariban uses the Brisbane area (seaside, highway, and city-scapes) to orient his retention of what is important in recollections of very specific areas of life: such descriptions are detailed, but understated - a tool to serve the lyrical intention of the poet.
Sariban's outlook is modern, and maturing. A Formula For Glass gives promise of further interesting developments in this poet's work.
Love that is dead, whatever its excuse, makes its own peculiar terms
love that is dead like a genie recalled withdraws to its terrarium Press your nose against the glass and your own breath
answers back
"A Formula For Glass II," p. 103
JOAN DAVIS
Germinal: Poetry and Poetics No. 2, Nov. 1985 (68 pages), and No. 3, Nov. 1986 (97 pages). Germinal, 16 Exeter Street, West End. Qld., 4101.
It is not usual to review ajournal which has already ceased publica- tion. The optimism and foresight expressed in Robert Habost's editorial in No. 2, 1985 (and the proposed twice-yearly publication), are quietly curtailed with the last of the three issues in 1986. This editor is to be commended for the presentation, which aesthetically complements the aims of the journal.
Information detailing new streams and eddies formed by the appli- cation of the critical consciousness to poetry needs to be as readily assessible as any other area which is deemed to be, in media terms,
"new." Consider the following, for example:
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