Transnational Literature Volume 7, no. 2 May 2015

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Complete Book Reviews: Poetry.

Transnational Literature, Volume 7, no. 2, May 2015.

http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html

Transnational Literature Volume 7, no. 2

May 2015

Complete book reviews: poetry in one file for ease of downloading and printing

Reviews editor: Patrick Allington

Harry Aveling Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw translated from the Burmese by Violet Cho and David Gilbert

Pratap Kumar Dash Homeward Bound edited by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi

Konstantina Georganta The Blind Man with the Lamp by Tasos Leivaditis, translated by N.N. Trakakis.

Michael Jacklin Persuading Plato by Ioana Petrescu

Umme Salma Fixing the Broken Nightingale by Richard James Allen.

Umme Salma Voices Across The Ocean: Poetry from Australia &

India edited by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi Debra Zott Net Needle by Robert Adamson

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Book reviews: Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw. Harry Aveling.

Transnational Literature Vol. 7 no. 2, May 2015.

Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw translated from the Burmese by Violet Cho and David Gilbert (Vagabond Press, 2014).

There is an established narrative about Burmese poetry from the central plains of Myanmar. It begins with written inscriptions from the eleventh century and develops into court verse: the first surviving poem being a cradle-song written in 1455 in honour of Princess Saw Shwe Kra of Arakan. A range of traditional forms continued to be used down to the final imposition of British rule after 1885.

During the 1930s, the ‘university wits’ created a more modern style of writing, hoping to broaden the subject matter of traditional literature and deepen its psychological content. When Burma became independent in 1948, many of these new trends continued to be popular but writers also sought competing models in Soviet as well as in US and English writing. Following the army coup in March 1962, the Printers’ and Publishers’ Registration Act of August 1962 required that copies of all books and magazines be examined by the Press Scrutiny Board, usually after publication. Explicit

guidelines issued in 1975 forbad the publication of anything detrimental to the Burmese Socialist Programme, the ideology of the state, the socialist economy, national unity and the rule of law. A further army coup in September 1988 led to the installation of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC, after 1997 the State Peace and Development Council, SPDC) and the imposition of even stricter censorship regulations. The laws were slightly modified but not removed in August 2012.

Contemporary Burmese poetry has been well represented in an outstanding recent anthology Bones Will Crow (ed. and trans. ko ko thett and James Byrne, Arc Publications, Todmorden 2012).

The present volume, Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw, is also translated from the Burmese language. However, these three authors are not ethnically Burmese.

Mya Kabyar (born 1974) is a member of the Chin ethnic minority in western Myanmar, who has lived in Yangon since 1994. Tin Nwan Lwin (born 1955) is a poet of Shan State origin who has lived in Myitkina, the capital city of the Kachin State, northern Myanmar, since the 1970s. Kyaw Zaw is Karen, an ethnic minority group in southern and southeast Myanmar; a former member of the insurgent Karen National Union and women’s activist, she is now based in the United States. They belong, as Cho and Gilbert suggest, to ‘the counter-narrative of Burmese poetry [which] takes account of oral literature, non-Burmese languages and writers in the periphery of the country and the diaspora’ (page ix).

The two poles of Mya Kabyar’s writing are the Chin Hills and ‘the city’. His sense of nostalgia for the Chin environment, culture and identity is very strong. The hills are beautiful: a place of rivers, mists, trees, upland rice, rice wine, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, flowers, and even snow: in Winter,

‘at the mountain range/ the snow is laying its eggs/ with a sense of white longing/ blowing forcefully into my chest’ (‘to the snowy mountain range’). They are rich in wildlife, and especially birds – the poems make frequent references to coucals (a bird in the cuckoo family) and hornbills (the state symbol). The hills are a site of ‘stories, music/ blood and sweat’ (‘our stone inscriptions’). They are an ancient setting for human rights, which ‘were in my grandfather’s village before I was born’, and, in fact, ‘not just human rights/ the forest spirits and the mountain spirits/ have spirit rights/ we’ve lived together’ (‘old Chin man’). But the hills are under pressure: ‘shifting cultivation, soil erosion/

deforestation exacerbated/ streams dried out/ biodiversity drying out/ rare orchids rarer’ (‘panorama of hornbills’). The people too are under pressure: ‘poverty at 73%/ consciousness fading/ an overseas influx/ where in the world/ blooms for our Canaan?’ (‘panorama of hornbills’). The innocence of those who remain is suspect. The poem entitled ‘unbelievable story’ recounts that, ‘the story begins/

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2 Book reviews: Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw. Harry Aveling.

“a long, long time ago/ for the sake of the Chin people/ an honest Chin”’, and the immediate response to this claim is that ‘the children stand and shout: don’t believe it! don’t believe it!’. The longest poem, ‘Chin’, admits:

… Chin people are hospitable but not all Chin can be hospitable Chin are honest

but not all Chin can be honest Chin live in the hills

but not all Chin can live in the hills Chin are faithful

but not all Chin can be faithful Chin are trusting

but not all Chin are simple most Chin are hill people

but not all Chin reject urban culture.

The inevitable consequence is, as the epigraph to the first poem suggests that, ‘if we follow the greater coucal/ we arrive in the city’. The poet describes himself as ‘Chin/ or … nearly Chin, an authentic fake’ (‘the last discovery’), and the Chin who fly to the city – for food, education, or for no reason at all – are also false; they are ‘coucals/ that cannot fly’ (‘greater coucals’). Or, as the title of one of the poems graphically suggests, ‘Chin in stone’.

Tin Nwan Lwin deals with a hard world of technology: ‘in the factory/ in the paddy field/ on the platform/ in the market/ on the road/ in life/ there are poems’ (‘discovering a poem’s place’). The first of his poems presented here, ‘sweat in the nest of minerals’, describes a mine in negative terms:

‘no sun/ no moon/ no stars/ only darkness’. The work is perhaps important (‘for us it was noble’, someone comments) but the end of the poem is only: ‘sweat on the mountain/ sweat underground/

sweat/ sweat/ regain strength beside loss’. The same hardness colours his fondness for trains and cars – ‘white cream/ ready for a race/ Toyota Hilux/ Nissan Pajero/ step up to the starting line/ amidst fog/

Myitkyina-Hpakant/ cars’ journey a ceremonious cycle’ (‘prominent labyrith’). And even people: ‘a curlicued sarong/ yin pon blouse/ a thinly painted face/ Daw Thi’s thanaka*/ wearing jasmine’

(‘magazine readers’, *a skin care product). Rivers appear – Maykha, Malika, Irrawaddy – they are good for making beer and getting drunk (‘drunken confluence’). Modern society has no room for the soft world of Mya Kabyar’s nostalgia.

Each of these writers has been a political activist. Mya Kabyar helped found the Chin Progressive Party and is a member of its Executive Committee. Tin Nwan Lwin was heavily

involved in the pro-democracy uprising of 1988, against the dictatorship of General Ne Win. Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw’s poetry is shaped by a feminine perception of the politics of rebellion, shared with her family. The men fight; women support them and provide for the bare decencies of civilised life in refugee camps: ‘blackboards/ chalk/ papers of poems/ amidst tiny stars/ a jasmine/ flowers pure’

(‘her’). They grieve: ‘revolutionary, patriotic son/ if you see the rebel tell him/ his sick mother has died/ the whole village/ turned to ash’ (‘a poem of flimsy rhyme’). But they are also steel: ‘a woman lacking tears/ doesn’t cry on set/ doesn’t cry behind the scenes/ too used to casualties/ a rebel wife/

my mother’ (‘rebel venom’). Khaing Mar too is nostalgic for an alternative nation that is being slowly destroyed by money and military force, but in her case the situation allows no positive outcome: ‘a disease/ without medicine/ just exiled life’ (‘paint drop’).

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3 Book reviews: Poems of Mya Kabyar, Tin Nwan Lwin & Khaing Mar Kyaw Zaw. Harry Aveling.

The Asia Pacific Poetry Series is a major opportunity for readers to enter into the complexity of the emotional worlds of our surrounding region. Cho and Gilbert’s own political commitment is a strong driving force behind this present anthology. (Cho is herself a Karen journalist and activist living in exile.) The translations are spare and sharp: in ‘nine branches of literature/ life is united/

many children/ born familiar/ poetry …/ poetry …/ poetry …’ (Tin Nwan Lwin, ‘giving birth to children’).

Harry Aveling

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Book Reviews: Homeward Bound: Poems from Australia & India edited by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi. Pratap Kumar Dash.

Homeward Bound: Poems from Australia and India, ed. by Jaydeep Sarangi and Rob Harle (Cyberwit.net, 2015)

The art of thinking anything about home can evoke a personal philosophy that is fully matured and delicate. This is clearly evident in the fourth book of an Australian-Indian poetry series published by Cyberwit. It also reflects the literary ties that Australia and India are developing.

The concept of home is the thrust forward throughout the book, with multiple artistic

delineations related to the present dwelling place, ancestral place, spiritual set-up, place with bitter sweet memories, one’s native place or country, place of refuge, or the concept of home of the displaced ones.

Eight Indian and eight Australian poets contribute four poems each. From these, there are five poems with the title ‘Home’. Each has its own concept. For example, indigenous writer Ali Cobby Eckermann, in one poem, expresses doubt if our children today look under rocks and whether they would find home in ‘dry river’; ‘dead birds’ beach fenced’; and ‘dead fish on shore.’(18). Poet Bashabi Fraser talks of home with reference to pet animals forming a part of the family and being taken care of by mother and at the same time accounts for the wild and stray birds and animals returning home. Bibhu Padhi suggests that home is where we are today.

We welcome strangers as relations and our home perched among our children’s grudging smiles.

B.O. Allen gives a sensually delicious thought of home and breathes with flowing cool breezes on hot days: ‘flavours thoughts’ (37). He seems to develop divinity and become a lover of nature by enjoying the company of birds, trees and herbs. Home is earth’s luxury, a settling in the small room of her life. Nathaniel Buckland offers a concept of home that abounds the trees that

murmur and groan remembering their long ago forests surrounded by the procreation of

creatures. Vinita Agrawal beautifully says that home has no walls, no rooms, no furniture and no thresholds. It is built in the eyes ‘erected by naked and hungry hearts’ (118).

In addition, five poems specifically give readers the associated rhetorical themes on the concept of home. In ‘Homeward Bound’, Rogers speaks of tide-washed pebbles shores as a memory. Confusing navigation of the temporal with ‘intimations of immorality’ (15) brings a sense that makes him ‘homeward bound emotionally’ (15). B.O. Allen’s ‘Leaving Home’ talks of the poet’s beautiful country. She remembers the sound of birds, which are dry and ancient but bear a friendly voice of freedom. In ‘Home Coming’, Gopal Lahiri speaks of how things

negotiate; past, present and future exist all at once, turning layers of the time plane that occur in unison in his homecoming. Flowerbeds and fountains, old staircase drops, gossips and stories, empty rooms and the courtyard fill with layers of memories. Hamish Danks Brown, in ‘Home is Herewith the Both of Us’, focuses on how he and his partner have dwelt in delight wherever they are; moving on somewhere has never made them stay close. In ‘Meditations on Home’, Sunil Sharma speaks of free-mindedness as a socialist, which is in fact difficult to maintain.

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The poets have also attributed differently to earthly and human concepts like times or seasons, events, objects and experiences. For example, in ‘A Funeral Song’, Eckermann speaks of her turn as a singer in the funeral which happens to be a unique experience for her. In her poem ‘Summer’, she reflects on a summer storm that transforms and gathers birds in feather country dancing to the music of wood giving a natural sense of home. Her ‘Time’ speaks of how people have been watching home rituals being observed for generations and how old people perish making the family wait for the arrival of new voices.

The poems of Bashabi Fraser, such as ‘Our Bird Table’, ‘The Midnight Calls’, and ‘The Family Photograph’, reflect on the reminiscences of home in different ways. The spirit of ‘Time’

is found echoing in ‘The Family Photograph’, reminding the poet of the past and future of their family. Bibhu Padhi’s ‘The Green Light’ speaks of his miraculous feelings as every little thing seems to have been transformed by the light into the lucidity of April, full of joy and dreams, whereas ‘The Garden’ artistically reveals his hope that birds would come in order to continue the unfulfilled activities. His poem ‘Father’s Voices’ gives a sense of very natural Indian family ambience with the importance of father as father’s voice is often harsher but still bears an undertone of humbleness and love. Gopal Lahiri’s ‘Surreal Canvas’ wishes to pass from one world to another, leaving things behind as they look like surreal pictures on canvas, and his wary eyes and hunched shoulders still search for a sweet home. ‘Solitary Confinement’ gives the idea of the charm of novelty in search of a new home, whereas in ‘Tiny Raindrops’ he remembers how the raindrops shower holding arms under an arjun tree, blowing conch shells, trees filled with birds and the fading light over the wooden shape. L.J. Shore’s ‘Elephants’, ‘Ghost Figs’, and ‘Rainforest Retreat’, Buckland’s ‘New Moon’, and ‘Green’, Vinita Agrawal’s ‘Bare of Shade’ and ‘ Summer We Called Home’ illustrate the experiences of the poets with different natural set-ups both in reality and imagination.

The poets Sunil Sharma and Usha Kishore reflect on their sense of reaction with unique socio-cultural and spiritual crisis. Sharma, in his four-part poem under the title ‘Meditations on Home’, says that earlier he had a socialist and free-spirited self which became futile with the identity crisis that developed as a consequence of the so-called post-modern society where change and unrest is a common feature. Similarly, Usha, in her poems ‘New City’, ‘Musings over Kerala’, ‘Writing India’ and ‘Distance’, gives a diasporic outlook of home where she becomes a distant voice. In this way, there are poems reflecting human nature, as in Roger’s

‘Beyond Simplicity: A Home Portrait’ that says how home has momentary peace: ‘long cast rhythmic interchanges progressing time’s generational march through memory’s arch’. In

‘Memory’s challenge’, he speaks of how the house remembers a passerby, and floors recall

‘footfalls and memory’.

In the final section, the poem by Jaydeep Sarangi entitled ‘Home of Poems’ makes a poem a home and this home concept leads to the formation of art of Gandhara that brings about

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nostalgia of perfection in thought and action. This is followed by ‘Had Things Been Different’, a poem by Rob Harle that marks the end of the book. This poem creates a captivating thought of home by a poetic visualisation of feelings of the warmth of home under the ‘mighty steel-gray bridge’ (121) where there are elements to ‘mesmerize’ (121) with the sense of home instantly amidst the hue and cry of so called daily chores.

The collection of poems is a blend of creativity and vivid picturisation of different homes and/or community cultures. There are changes in thoughts and imaginations embedded with the changing time and situations in India as well as Australia. In poems about both the nations, a reader might notice a reflection of sensitivity of choice of subject matter and subtlety of revelation of moods and modalities on a tapestry of free subjective choice. As is common, the concept of home has been consolidated as a place of rest as usual – but a reader can also notice that human thoughts and actions relating to home have been expressed through diverse

reflections of culture, tradition and events that constitute elements of sweetness and bitterness, loss and gain, birth and death and still aspire to stretch up on to the other arches of life.

Pratap Kumar Dash

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Book reviews: The Blind Man with the Lamp by Tasos Leivaditis. Konstantina Georganta.

Tasos Leivaditis, The Blind Man with the Lamp, translated by N.N. Trakakis (Denise Harvey, 2014)

Tasos Leivaditis’s The Blind Man with the Lamp, translated and introduced by N.N. Trakakis, is a self-contained universe of the history and tone of modern Greek post-war poetics. Sampling the work of a poet whose first collection was a voice given to the ones exiled in the island of Makronesos (Μάχη στην άκρη της Νύχτας: To Χρονικό της Μακρονήσου / Battle at the Edge of the Night, 1952), the collection, originally published in Greek in 1983, is a precious addition to the arguably short list of work by Greek poets available in the English language. Leivaditis’s title brings to mind Diogenes of Sinope walking about in full daylight with a lamp looking for an honest man but also the alertness of the blind who, having honed their senses to compensate for their situation, become telling poetic symbols for a kind of Tiresias’s seeing blindness. From the onset, then, one is expecting a collection of poems about the never-ending search for whatever it is that makes us human, a poignant theme as much as it is diachronic.

‘Leivaditis is, I suspect, quickly assimilated into the poetry of the post-war generation, thus effectively silencing the profound ways in which his writing grapples with but also transcends the struggles and concerns of a particular epoch’ (p. ix): the book starts with an elegantly written and very informative introduction to the life and work of Tasos Leivaditis (1922- 1988) but also to the cultural and political context surrounding his work. This is invaluable for readers who know little of post-war Greek poetry as it aids the placement of Leivaditis’s work at the moment of its creation and hence allows one to comprehend the significance of the main images and symbols the poet uses.

Prior to submerging oneself to Leivaditis’s poetic universe, the reader learns what it could have meant to grow up in post-1922 Athens; what influences were imported from beyond national borders (surrealism and communism); how the generation of the 1930s played a crucial role in invigorating Greek literature and balancing out the disillusionment of the 1920s, at which point in his life Leivaditis enrolled in the youth wing of the communist resistance movement during World War II;

and how in the aftermath of the Civil War leftist artists such as Yannis Ritsos, Aris Alexandrou and Manos Katrakis were arrested and exiled to camps. Leivaditis published his first poem at the beginning of the Civil War in the winter of 1946-47 while his first poetry collections in 1952 followed his release from detention (for over three years in various islands) and coincided with the beginning of another eleven years of right-wing rule in Greece under General Papagos’s party. In the introduction to the volume, we find the following lines which transfer the torment of one of

Leivaditis’s first collections built upon his memories of exile:

Brother are you here?

I can’t see you in the dark and this corporal

he is late what time is it?

I’m cold.

I’m cold too light up a match what time is it?

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2 Book reviews: The Blind Man with the Lamp by Tasos Leivaditis. Konstantina Georganta.

how are we to believe again in the world?

what time is it?

[...]

What time is it in the dark?

what time is it in the rain?

what time is it today on all the earth?

What time is it?

(from Battle at the Edge of the Night, 1952, italics in the volume)

Trakakis takes the reader through all of Leivaditis’s collections, leading them to the 1983 The Blind Man with the Lamp, all the while explaining the various periods the poet lived through from the socialist realism of his early days, which reflected the traumas of war, to the economic and social construction of post-war life and the rise of the ‘poetry of defeat’, which expressed the alienation, despair and loss of daily affairs and intimate relationships (pp. xviii-xx). This phase was, in turn, abruptly interrupted by the military junta (1967-1974) in the post-1972 years (marked by the

publication of Night Visitor), when the poet grappled with the threat of nihilism. At this point in the introduction, Trakakis nods at his audience with a few lines of Leivaditis’s prose-poem ‘Lamp’

(1979), which is strategically placed early on in the volume to make the words ‘time’, ‘others’,

‘home’ and ‘oblivion’ echo so that readers open up to some of the poet’s main themes and symbols:

Each time I begin to speak, I know that I’ll say nothing:

words will betray me, time will bypass me, the others will stand indifferent outside the house. Until, finally, I will be nothing other than someone who, holding a lamp, would go from room to room

lighting the oblivion.

In addition, the translator provides a more detailed introduction to the world of the 1983 collection at hand and its four sections, namely, ‘Laurels for the Defeated’ (36 short prose-poems),

‘Conversations’ (12 prayer-like poems addressed to the Lord), ‘Brother Jesus’ (4 brief passages reminiscent of the Gospels), and ‘Up All Night’ (44 prose-poems):

The Blind Man with the Lamp gives powerful voice to the elegiac remembrance of the past and the concomitant desire for something wholly (and holy) Other. Memories of the battles and personalities of bygone days, imbued with feelings of loss and mourning, are portrayed so intimately that we almost believe that they are our very own. (p. xxv)

The collection is a pleasure to read both in the original Greek and, now, in this fine and carefully drafted English translation. Poet and critic Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos has written that poetry is not translated, it is just written and re-written while recent T.S. Eliot prize winner David

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3 Book reviews: The Blind Man with the Lamp by Tasos Leivaditis. Konstantina Georganta.

Harsent talked of his translations of several of Yannis Ritsos’s poems as ‘adaptation or hommage’.¹ In a similar vein, the translator’s feat is that he has produced a body of translations that flow in the target language and are a hommage to the Greek poet’s work. As a final note, here is the volume’s final poem (which also gives a sense of the translator’s use of hyphens to counteract the poet’s

‘paratactic manner of writing’ and ‘sparse use of periods within each poem’, p. xxviii):

I couldn’t remember how I got here, in this room with the blinding light – I was sitting at a table, and opposite me was my fellow card player, a man unknown to me – we’d been playing for hours, perhaps even years – the pack of cards: worn out, ominous – not a cent of my money was left – ‘I raise you my past!’ I shouted – the other’s eyelids were lowered murderously – he dealt the cards – I lost – ‘I raise you all my future days!’ I howled –

and then I noticed that I was not all alone on a deserted building lot, and in the distance the city lay destroyed - from what? and I, who was I? where was I going? – ‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ I whispered, ‘at last all is finished.

Now I can start over again.’

(‘Lethal Game’)

Δεν μπορούσα να θυμηθώ πώς βρέθηκα εδώ, σ’ αυτήν την κάμαρα με το εκτυφλωτικό φως, καθόμουν μπροστά σ’ ένα τραπέζι, απέναντι ο συμπαίκτης άγνωστος, θα παίζαμε ώρες, ίσως και χρόνια, η τράπουλα φθαρμένη, δυσοίωνη, δε μου ‘μενε δεκάρα, «παίζω το παρελθόν μου» φώναξα, τα βλέφαρα του άλλου χαμήλωσαν δολοφονικά, μοίρασε χαρτιά, έχασα, «παίζω όλες τις μελλοντικές μου μέρες» ούρλιαξα –

και τότε είδα ότι βρισκόμουν ολομόναχος σ’ ένα έρημο οικόπεδο, η πόλη μακριά καταστραμμένη, από τι; κι εγώ ποιος ήμουν; πού πήγαινα; «γλυκιά μητέρα του Χριστού, ψιθύρισα – επιτέλους όλα τέλειωσαν.

Τώρα μπορώ να ξαναρχίσω».

(«Θανάσιμο Παιχνίδι»)

Konstantina Georganta

1 Gerasimos Lykiardopoulos, «Μίμηση Ήχων», in Μίμηση Ήχων: Σημειώσεις για την ποίηση (Mimesis of Sounds: Notes on poetry) (Athens: Ypsilon, 2014) p. 16); David Harsent, In Secret:

Versions of Yannis Ritsos ( London: Enitharmon Press, 2012).

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Book reviews: Persuading Plato by Ioana Petrescu. Michael Jacklin.

Ioana Petrescu, Persuading Plato (Ginninderra Press, 2012)

Translingual writing is an aspect of literary production that is receiving increasing attention from scholars worldwide. In a recent issue of L2 Journal, editors Stephen Kellman and Natasha Lvovich argue that although translingual writing – that is, writing across languages, or writing in a language that is not the author’s first – may be as old as the earliest forms of alphabetic script, its practice has become especially widespread in contemporary culture.¹ With the mass movements of peoples through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the works of writers who have chosen to write in a language which is not their first provide scholars with diverse sources for critical reflection on literature, language, identity and place. It is surprising, therefore, that the term ‘translingual literature’ has limited currency in Australia, a nation in many ways defined by the multicultural composition, if not the multilingual capabilities, of its peoples. Is this apparent lack of interest in the translingual dimensions of Australian writing a symptom of the lingering assumption that Australian writing is monolingual, regardless of the linguistic background and heritage of its writers? (A notable exception to this lack of attention to translingual literature among Australian scholars is to be found in the work of Mary Besemeres, to whom I am grateful for pointing me towards the issue of L2 Journal cited above.)

This is a question I found myself asking as I read Ioana Petrescu’s poetry collection Persuading Plato. Petrescu’s work is a prime example of translingual as well as transnational literature. The forty-one poems in Persuading Plato move between Romania, the country of the author’s birth, and South Australia where Petrescu has lived since 1996. In between Romania and Australia, Petrescu also lived and studied in Germany and England, suggesting she had at least three languages before migrating here. Although her first poems were written and published in Romanian, Petrescu switched to writing in English when she came to Adelaide to undertake a PhD and where she also became involved in the Friendly Street poets group. In her nearly two decades in Australia, Petrescu has lectured in Professional and Creative Writing at the University of South Australia, edited five anthologies of poetry and has had her own poetry published both in Australia and overseas.² Persuading Plato is her third collection of poetry. By every indication, Petrescu’s switch from writing in Romanian to writing in English has been a success; her career as academic, editor and creative writer attests to that. Yet her migration to Australia as an adult is a fact of her life’s trajectory. Her poems draw attention to this. And so as I read this latest collection I couldn’t help wonder what traces might be found of the poet’s movement across languages.

The first poem, ‘Tear gas (Romania 1991)’, is set in a railway compartment where the narrator is engaged in conversation with a miner who had marched on the capital the previous year,

participated in riots, and ‘got carried away’ (9). The rioters had ‘smashed windows and doors, beat up policemen, / declared war on intellectuals, raped women in miniskirts / “because that’s what they want, don’t they?”’ (9). The quotation marks indicate the words belong to the miner. As the two people speak, the poet realises that, despite the feeling of solidarity she has for the man, ‘if he’d seen me / wearing a miniskirt in the university street, / he and his mates would have beaten me up’ (10).

The tear gas of the title references both the experience of the miner during the riots and, in the final

1 Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich. ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Literary Translingualism: Multilingual Identity and Creativity’. L2 Journal 7 (2015): 3-5. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9tp862z8

2 For Petrescu’s biographical details, I have drawn on the AustLit entry at: www.austlit.edu.au/page/A14549 .

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2 Book reviews: Persuading Plato by Ioana Petrescu. Michael Jacklin.

line, the irritation the poet now feels: ‘His eyes aren’t swollen and itchy any more. Mine are.’ (10) What goes unremarked – unmentioned because it is obvious – is the process of translation embedded in the poem. The dialogue in Romanian is conveyed in this poem to its Australian readers in English.

The poet is evoking an episode in her country of origin, and recalling, in a conversation, its violence both actual and threatened. The poem three pages later, ‘Revolution Scenario, Romania 1989’, also infers a link between language and violence with its description of women locking ‘their screams inside’ and in its lines, ‘words hang on men’s lips / like wet cigarette butts, / stain their breath and tongues’ (13). I read these opening poems not only as representations of the upheaval of the poet’s separation from her country of origin, but also as an indication of some aspect of her separation from her first language, including the fear and violence that mark that separation.

Migration and relocation to Australia do not mean a complete separation from one’s first language. Later poems indicate movement between countries and languages. Near the end of the book are two poems for the poet’s parents, the first titled ‘Poem for my mother who died of cancer in 2007’ and the second ‘His collarbone’, one of the most beautiful in this collection. In ‘His

collarbone’, the poet is attending the burial of her mother. The priest pours oil on her coffin, though the poet says, ‘I don’t know why, / I haven’t been to church in years’ (62). The poem continues:

There are two bags on the side of the grave.

These are your grandmother’s bones, he says, and these are your father’s.

First time I see my father after twenty years, a bag of bones. I shouldn’t faint, it’s him, and yet, all I can see poking through the bag

is this delicately curved white collarbone. (62)

And the poet then recalls, ‘Priests and doctors. / The first poke at your soul, my father used to say, / the second at your body’ (62). Again, I point to these lines to draw attention to the poet

remembering conversations in her first language – with the priest, in recent memory, and, from much earlier, from childhood perhaps, with her father. Here the relationship with language infers an

association not with violence, as in the earlier poems, but with familial attachment and love, and with mourning and loss.

Between these opening and closing poems is ‘pickled tongue’, the one poem in this collection that speaks explicitly of language in a migrant nation such as Australia:

language an olive on my pickled tongue, the jar suspended on the shelf of (in)difference.

cry in a language, laugh in another, add pepper and chilli. (17)

The absence of upper case in both the title and the beginning of the first line sets this poem apart, an indication perhaps of its non-conformity. Its acknowledgement that one may live, cry and laugh in multiple languages is one that reflects the experiences of many thousands of Australians. However, its recognition of the ‘(in)difference’ with which language diversity is often received by the dominant monolingual culture is also an accurate comment.

Persuading Plato is not only about language in a migrant nation. A group of its poems cluster around professional concerns: some are devoted to the writing and editing processes, while another evokes the experience of delivering a lecture and the need to ‘find a friendly face in the audience’

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3 Book reviews: Persuading Plato by Ioana Petrescu. Michael Jacklin.

(49). A number of the poems highlight the everyday, the comfort of mundane tasks such as doing the dishes, the tidiness and regularity contrasted with ‘the transitory intersective moment’ (58). Yet, even in these poems of the quotidian, language difference intrudes. In ‘Amateur in the leafy suburbs’, the poet explains that, as she becomes more established in the neighbourhood, ‘the owner of the corner Deli / and the hairdresser suddenly understand my accent’ (20). Amusingly, though, their

comprehension lapses ‘when they learn that I am renting’ (20), indicating that language is not the only potential barrier to be overcome. Like the poet’s conversation with the miner, it is the

intersection of ‘other people’s unparallel lives’ (58), perspectives and languages (even when they are mostly conveyed in English) that make Petrescu’s work especially relevant to contemporary

Australian culture.

Michael Jacklin

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Book Reviews: Fixing the Broken Nightingale by Richard James Allen. Umme Salma.

Richard James Allen, Fixing the Broken Nightingale (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2013) I have come across many books of poems in Bengali and English, but none quite like Fixing the Broken Nightingale. It is very artistic and cute in appearance and it is appealing to keep with during meals, at journeys and at sleep time. I should congratulate Richard James Allen for the innovative style for this book of poems that can make poetry ‘a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man’¹ in this age of electronic recreations.

Fixing the Broken Nightingale consists of a handful of excellent lyrics, grouped into five sections under the headings Natural Disasters, Unanswered Questions, Occasional Truths, Flickering Enlightenment and A Scheme for Brightness. A Prologue and an Epilogue tie them neatly. With this structural texture, the poet adds more tincture, presenting a mysteriously windy portrait of the Woolloomooloo Bay Evening on the front cover of the pocketbook.

All the poems are hilariously lofty. Richard Allen offers reflections on grave matters in such a light and luminous tone that they provoke, in this reader at least, both laughter and thought. He touches a myriad of themes with lucid and colloquial language, giving readers the chance to visualise happenings and thoughts. His informal way of grasping real-life trivial issues is so fascinating that it shocks and amuses us together. Maybe he thought it would be the best way to fix the broken nightingale, the human being/the singing poet who is always chased by ‘Time’s winged chariot’.²

The Prologue and Epilogue contain the poet’s poetic hope and desire. He wants to transcend his time and as a poet wants to be a timeless being. But this he cherishes with the alarming consciousness that nothing lasts forever in this mundane world. The Prologue shocks and fascinates me at once when I imagine the poet is dancing with the reader of his poem just at the moment that the reader reads his poems. It can happen now or in any other age when the printed poems have been blurred or softwared into the computer system. In his waltzing, he feels sorry, thinking that time is transitory. The Epilogue ends the book, but not the desire of the poet to continue writing. He hopes one day he will wake up like the seven sleepers from his eternal sleep and will write some precious lines. He believes this because the poet’s soul cannot die as it has tasted the nectar from ‘the blazing river of Soul’ (113).

All five divisions of the texts deal with multi-layered themes, but here I will highlight only a few. Natural Disasters consists of thirteen poems, which are about natural disasters usually occurring in human life. But the poet makes the title heavy, and amusingly the reader would find a bathetic effect during reading and recitation. The poet has this sort of disaster in mind:

someone in your family once read my novel or may be studied it at school

I found an old copy an early penguin edition

down behind the back row of books

1 William Wordsworth. ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballad’. The Harvard Classics, 1909-14.1-14. Selected by Charles W.

Eliot. Accessed 8 April 2015. http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html

2 Andrew Marvell. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 edited by Arthur Quiller- Couch. 357. Accessed 10 April 2015. http://www.bartleby.com/101/357.html

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at the bottom of your bookcase (Birthplace, 18)

Or, in the poem ‘Famous Person’ Allen says what happens when he is forgetting a famous person who has received newspaper coverage:

I got a shock seeing you in the newspaper I’d just finished putting you out of my mind […]

the newspaper sits on top of the recycling pile glaring at me. (22)

In ‘how many umbrellas or love letters’, Allen compares his forgotten umbrellas with ‘giant origami love letters’ and silly forgetfulness with ‘a major contribution’ that can save people from natural disaster such as rain and shipwreck. In ‘wonderment as a question’ he forbids us to question the natural cycle of day and night of the world. He advises to take wonderment as such and to step into it and be ‘Gloriously/wet’ with its shower. In ‘the perils of Unfindability’, the poet tells how careful and calculative he should be falling in love, for otherwise his ecosystem will be destroyed or he will drown in waters that Google Maps will not be able to show.

The part Unanswered Questions deals with man-woman relationships. Allen surfs into the

complexities of such relationships with joy and pathos. In ‘For the girl who fell in love with New York or A visit to my Emotional Museum’ he sorrowfully depicts the imagery of turning and spinning, a usual thing in any unrequited love in an exceptional way:

You turned my head,

and then you turned my body, and then you turned my heart.

I wasn’t planning on turning, but you did it, anyway. And now you have me spinning like a weather vane on top of a building (34)

In this part, the most interesting poems are ‘13 Acts of Unfulfilled Love’. Here the poet describes his atomic feelings of love and sex. The poems echo a sense of agitation, regret and despair over the physical attachment where the question becomes the following: can the nearness of the two bodies proximate the two souls? In ‘Act Seven’, Allen writes:

Our bodies are in an endless conversation

but I have no idea what’s going on in your head (40)

The thirteen poems of the piece Occasional Truths carry truths the poet feels to exist in this world. Each poem carries different types of truths of human life and of the world. In ‘Cerulean

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Memories’ Allen talks about the beauty that no longer can be found in his beloved who is now

‘like blue leaves drifting down from the trees’ (71). ‘Kokoda’, meanwhile, expounds amazingly the sameness of human life in this world. We think that we are unique but the uniqueness exists in all periods and all generations. All live in the here and now and thus through sacrifice and dedication of one generation next generation can continue their life:

I breathe in thank you

for sacrificing your moment so that I could have mine (74)

The parts Flickering Enlightenment and A Scheme for Brightness are the poet’s shift from the personal to the spiritual and transcendental matters. He not only explores the deep psyche of human soul – pure and guilty – but opens up the path of poetry and art to goes beyond this fragile being:

God

Is not designed For us

We are designed For God

Our task

To carry grace (Grace 81)

In sentence structure, sentence design, capitalisation, punctuation, diction, rhyme and rhythm, Allen appears to experiment with the poetic form. For example, in the poem ‘Act Three’ of 13 Acts of Unfulfilled Love, one sentence moves forward step by step into twelve lines where one verse means one or two words. The poems ‘it doesn’t take long to forget’ and ‘Gone Fishin’’

liken prose written in a diary or notebook. Allen’s utterances sometimes appear in full sentences, sometimes in single words, and sometimes in broken lines that flow freely in an off-beat

cadence. Fixing the Broken Nightingale, Allen’s tenth contemplation in the mysterious cave of poems, is a fine collection.

Umme Salma

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Book Reviews: Voices Across The Ocean: Poetry from Australia & India edited by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi. Umme Salma.

Voices Across The Ocean: Poetry from Australia & India edited by Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi (Cyberwit 2014)

In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and thing violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.¹

Voices Across The Ocean, with its subtitle Poetry from Australia & India, reminds me of the words of William Wordsworth from his famous ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’. This third anthology of poetry from Australia and India – the two previous anthologies are Poetic Connections and Building Bridges – combines Australian and Indian poets from divergent cultural backgrounds. The poets Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi tie together poets from two different societies with the ribbon of poetic passion and let their chorus of emancipation and freedom spread among readers.

Attractively presented, the book looks like a ‘saree’ with an ‘anchal’ – the two Bengali words meaning a twelve-yard cloth with an arty end. It seems so because the texture of the book serially holds poems from five Australian and five Indian poets and ends with two poems from the editors, Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi. The ten poets are Ali Cobby Eckermann, Bronwyn Owen Allen, Hamish Danks Brown, Nathalie Buckland, Peter Nicholson, Archana Sahni, D.C.

Chambial, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Vinita Agrawal and Vivekananda Jha. Four poems from each poet are framed by the photos, brief biographies and contact details.

In this slim and sweet anthology’s introduction, the editors talk about the general theme of the selected poems and the definition of poetry. According to them, the poems are commonly

concerned with personal, social, religious and political emancipation. They opine that the poems try to voice the unheard voices of the non-poets who feel but fail to articulate like the poets.

Thus, the poets included here, mostly women, speak aloud against the existing corruption, injustice and discrimination of human society in order to knock at the closed door of the conscience. This brings unity among the diverse poets. As the editors put it,

All the poets represented in this volume appear to us as deeply caring and hopeful of a better future for all humans, and even though they may seem as ‘voices crying the wilderness’ in this increasingly crass, mindless world of greed, corruption and political manipulation. They are saviours and heralds of a positive future for all of us. (4)

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poems begin the text with Australian poetry. Her poems liken the slow flow of a little brook that murmurs about silence, deprivation and deceit, entwined with the ordinary human life:

there is no escaping the silence

1Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”.The Harvard Classics, 1909-14.1-14. Selected by Charles W.

Eliot. 8 April 2015. http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html

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when hunting a kangaroo for food by foot nor the laughter of the chase

when a goanna is knocked out of a tree’ (‘Life is Often Silent’ 8)

But she also writes that friendship, gratitude and light can end all negativity and make it

desirable. She desires to be a mural, a silent observer, at a busy street in George Town so that she can ‘watch the cultures and the care’ (10) of human life.

Bronwyn Owen Allen, as ‘a proud feminist’ (12), writes about her personal desires and disappointments. In her personal life she always wants to break the rules and walk on the opposite highway but she confesses that, ‘I was not born to cause hurt’ (14).

Long, wordy and meditative, Hamish Danks Brown’s poems blend personal and social issues using scientific and geographical knowledge. The poem ‘Mentored By My Compass’ conveys why and how the diasporic poet, Brown, wants to be guided by his spinning compass in ‘the plain of passing irritants’ (22-24). ‘Valentine’s Day 2002’ does not tell us about love. Instead it talks about a trick the government played on protestors who have been against the

transformation of the scenic and historical Sandon Point into a modern town:

Late that same Valentine’s Night, just as we were dozing off with delight, a strong earth tremor reminded the region

that the Indo-Australian plate keeps moving north.(28)

Nathalie Buckland’s poems are nihilistic in theme and approach. She draws the picture of a town, of a time, of a patient and of a woman in her four poems. In ‘In My Town’ she talks about the town that is ruled by the old women with shaking bodies. They do all works when the young ones flee away from them and push them inside the home. In ‘Where is your baby?’ she asks the mother where her baby is whom she carried, gave birth and reared once:

Where is your baby now?

Perhaps somebody took him,

trying to break the cycle, weaning him from toxic mothering. (38)

In his poems, Peter Nicholson is conscious about the world where ‘there’s grief,/hunger at hand,/

horror near the red borders’ (46) and the country which forgets, ‘Skin hooks of delight/Catching in the throat/Freedom’s scarlet strength’ (41).The poet wants to resist this with love and says in the poem numbered ‘IV’, ‘We renew each circumstance/ With our feeling’s radiance’ (45).

The Indian poet Archna Sahni speaks out for the shackled and the exiled. Transliterating vocabularies of Tibet in English, she cries for the fettered Tibet, ‘the roof of the world’ (51), becoming free. Recounting wrong decisions of political leaders, she weaves the dream of returning to home:

I will come with you When prayer flags wave

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Amidst glittering sand or snow And from the countless

Streaming eyes of your people,

A million lotus flowers bloom. (53)

In D.C. Chambial’s lucid but profound and stimulating poems, the commonplace becomes rare and the simple becomes symbolic. In ‘Cat and Dove’ he says how the beauty and innocent is assaulted by the malefactors:

With the wink of an eye harmless dove’s done to death.

Happy the wily cat. (61)

Sanjukta Dasgupta writes as feminist using proper names like Mallika or Malini as the

representatives of the tortured and agonised Indian women. She is revolutionary and rebellious, worships the Goddess Kali as her inspiration and pines for the Eleventh Muse Ardhanariswar as her guide. She considers ‘Saree’, the traditional Indian Subcontinental women’s dress a chain to her that bars the progress of women:

Saree shackled woman

Crippled but with limbs intact Waits and waits and waits For that midnight hour Of metaporphosis – I am now stark dark Kali With flying tresses. (67)

Vinita Agrawalsketches the scenario of a pain-stricken country which ‘lies tortured and struggles to cope/Its heart lies buried in silence and despair/its soul lies banished, her freedom must crawl and grope’ (85). Here she views ‘a red hibiscus/flattened under you heel’ (83), which symbolises the forced abortion of one babygirl after another but,

No obituaries will be written for it.

Newspapers won’t report its loss. (83)

In this heartless world she wants to be that kind of ‘Love’ that ‘is alive not dead, composite not hollow, hungry not satiated’ (‘Call Me Love Tonight’ 84) as if she cannot be ‘Cold in

Oppression’s Shadow’ (85).

The poems of Vivekananda Jhasharply and sarcastically converse about ‘Man, chief justice of animals’ (‘Cut-throat’ 90), in whose heart ‘Cruelty like sediments into water container’ remains and ‘spoils/ The serenity and sanctity’ of it (‘Cruelty’ 92). This man imposes some inauthentic rules on the widows and does not acknowledge their needs and demands as human beings.

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Rob Harle and Jaydeep Sarangi join this singing of the universal song of the poets through their poems ‘Sandgate’ and ‘Stories of the Night’. Both poems sketch the night of the town they live in. Harle laments over a ferocious and furious city that does not give peace and rest to those who once built this city and now are in graves. Sarangi finds a mysterious feature of night when it falls. Someone with firm steps, he feels, walks besides us. He does not know who it is, but it opens the door of consciousness and drags him back or forth with the time to listen to its stories.

Umme Salma

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Robert Adamson, Net Needle (Flood Editions, 2015)

Robert Adamson is arguably Australia’s chief poet. He has at least twenty collections of poetry to his name and has won several major literary prizes for his work. At the time of writing this review he is on tour in the United States, giving readings at the Poetry Center in San Francisco and at other venues in other cities, including Chicago where Net Needle, his most recent collection of poetry, was published by Flood Editions (the Australian edition is published by Black Inc.).

What do you expect when you pick up a collection of Adamson’s poems? Birds, the river, poems dedicated to other poets; poems that depict experiences of being incarcerated as a younger man and of becoming a poet, falling in love with language. In this regard, Net Needle does not disappoint. It delivers what the reader already expects and many of the poems have appeared

elsewhere. However, this collection represents a different and deliberate arrangement of poems and, in this regard, it has an essence of its own.

Don’t try to interpret or understand the poems on a first reading. Enjoy the language; absorb the feeling; enjoy the flights of imagination. Envisage the poet as hawk, his ‘connection to sky’ (89) and recognise him as a keen observer of nature and purveyor of spiritual dimension wrought through language. Even allow yourself to become one with the hawk and the feeling of a poem, but do not attempt to swoop on meaning prematurely, to swallow the stalked prey of singular sense. Come back to the poems again and again and allow them to breathe and deepen as you step into the scenery and begin to weigh the words on your own scales of experience. In a review of The Kingfisher’s Soul (Bloodaxe, 2009), Jonathan Shaw commented that, ‘When he read at Sappho’s recently, Adamson remarked in passing that he generally doesn’t know what his poems are about until he’s finished writing them, and often not even then.’¹ So perhaps it doesn’t matter at all what the poems mean or what they are about. Just let the language and imagery wash over you as you read and enjoy.

Let us think about Net Needle as a title and as an overarching metaphor. Net needles are used by fishermen to make or mend nets; to stitch together. They are generally carved by hand and take a fair amount of patience to complete. Net making is a craft, as is writing poetry, and the net makers, as Adamson tells us in the poem of that title, ‘wove everything they knew / into the mesh, along with the love they had, / or had lost, or maybe not needed’ (15). They are also described as having an

‘inner tongue’, which holds the thread in place. Doesn’t the poet also have an inner tongue? The image of a net needle appears on the Flood Editions cover. It is a photograph taken by Adamson’s partner, photographer Juno Gemes, to whom the book is dedicated: ‘heart’s needle, soul’s compass’.

There is also an illustration of a net needle at intervals throughout the book and with each repetition of the image the net needle is in a different position, seeming to stitch its way into the book, stitching the words and images and subject matter together into an all encompassing net of language.

Net Needle contains 42 poems, beginning with ‘Listening to Cuckoos’ and ending with ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul’. ‘Listening to Cuckoos’ begins with ‘Two unchanging notes; to us, words.../

downward-ending notes that pour through a falling of night / coming over the distances, words that don’t change’. It is the first day of spring, a season of growth and blossoming, but the poem implies constancy. Toward the end of the poem, the storm birds also call ‘two notes, two words’ at twilight and they are still there at dawn, cackling ‘in the broken-egged dawn, in the echoing light’. All we learn of the words is that they are ‘not exactly a self – not quite’ (1) and the reader may find him or

1 Jonathan Shaw. Review of The Kingfisher’s Soul (Bloodaxe, 2009)

https://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/adamsons-kingfishers-soul/.

Book reviews: Net Needle by Robert Adamson. Debra Zott.

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herself longing to know what those words are that don’t change. Perhaps those words are ‘not quite’

and the poem might signifiy the beginning of a transformation, of becoming an evolved soul – a fully realised self.

The last poem in the book, ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul’, appears to be looking back on the transmutation of a human soul having begun anew after a ‘season in hell’, to here to borrow from Rimbaud. The poem opens with a wave breaking on boulders. It feels like a cathartic moment.

A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders, Explodes, fans into fine spray, a fluid wing, Then drops back onto the tide: a spume

Of arterial blood. ... (89)

The broken boulders might represent a broken soul, while the wave is ‘a fluid wing’– it fits with the bird imagery but might also be interpreted as the wing of an angel. The action of the wave hitting the boulder is powerful, stunning and if you’ve ever been so close to a wave breaking on rocks you will know the force and impact and the refreshing shock of that fine sea spray. The

‘arterial blood’ is also shocking and interesting as arteries are connected to the heart and a cut artery will spurt blood with great force every time the heart beats. As a metaphor for the journey of a soul it seems to signify a critical turning point – a wakeup call perhaps. This is not the place for further literary analysis so I will simply say that it seems a well-chosen poem to end the collection with, if a large number of the poems in between are considered as moments along the way in the journey of a soul that ends by stepping into the peace and promise of the future.

In between these two fine poems are a number of poems featuring birds, the river, fishermen and childhood memories, as well as poems about or after other poets such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Randolph Stow, Michael Dransfield, Francis Webb and William Blake, to name a handful. ‘Via Negativa, The Divine Dark’, which won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2011, is included and poses the question, ‘What form, shape, or song / might represent a soul?’ (12) ‘The Shark-Net Seahorses of Balmoral’ provides an example of clever alliteration: ‘Below the scattering / school of gar, whiting cruised for worms’ (30). Do you feel the movement in the scattering gar and the slowing down of the line for the cruising whiting?

‘The Coriander Fields Long Bay’ suggests imagination and ideas as a balm against fears and possibly as an escape from the reality of incarceration. However, the imagination isn’t quite strong enough to quell those fears because it also conjures up negative ideas. One such idea is borne out by the metaphor of a cabbage moth with a lopsided wing that ‘spins in circles’ and leads to a suicide attempt. In another Long Bay poem, the newly formed debating society is given a topic to debate, by the Governor. The topic is, ‘Is the Sydney Opera House Really Necessary?’ Earlier, we see the ‘I’ of the poem, presumably Adamson, reading novels ‘And the poetry of Percy Shelley’. When asked by the education officer what he plans to do with his future, the answer is, ‘I’d tell him I wanted to be a poet’, which is immediately construed as insolence. By inference, then, the Opera House topic is clearly an exercise in attacking and defending the Arts.

Many of the poems are set by the Hawkesbury River where Adamson lives. The scenery is ever changing and never tiresome. Many of the events and encounters in these poems begin with something quite ordinary but the ordinary is often transformed into something extraordinary, sublime even. In the prose poem, ‘A Proper Burial’, an encounter from the previous Christmas is recalled when, ‘The other night outside our house an owlet nightjar swooped down onto the road after a

Book reviews: Net Needle by Robert Adamson. Debra Zott. 2 Transnational Literature Vol. 7 no. 2, May 2015.

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moth’. The recalled encounter begins when the poet goes out to buy milk on Christmas Day and notices an injured bird on the road. He pulls the car over and goes back to discover a tawny frogmouth that had been run over and carries it off to the side of the road – quite an ordinary occurrence especially for one attuned to nature and birds. However, the encounter becomes extraordinary when a young Aboriginal girl in a white dress appears nearby and he discovers that there were actually two birds killed – one had swooped down ‘trying to help somehow’ and was also run over (71). The poet is left shaken and the experience never leaves his mind. I have only sketched out the poem here so as not to spoil it for the reader.

Debra Zott

Note: the reviewer made use of the US edition, published by Flood Editions. The Australian edition is published by Black Inc.

Book reviews: Net Needle by Robert Adamson. Debra Zott. 3 Transnational Literature Vol. 7 no. 2, May 2015.