Sydney City Poet

Poems Revisited: “Mothers and Daughters” by David Campbell

I often think that it is in the final line of a poem that the reader’s relationship to a poem really begins: it’s the last line that sends a reader back to the beginning of a poem that they will really love. These endings may open the poem out, resist a definitive “reading”, or they may feel like everything shuts up tight, a sprung trap. I’ve certainly heard arguments for both, and there are poets that have a decided preference for “open” or “closed” endings. For myself I find both approaches offer much to the reader: the widening view, the well-handled but slightly diffuse ending of course invites rereading as we seek to find out more about the processes, mechanisms, language, world of the poem; on the other hand, that sprung-trap feeling of a poem that brings everything together does not cut off the relationship of reader to poem, and invites the question “How did he/she do that?” just as much as the poem that contains, in Whitman’s words, multitudes.

David Campbell is a poet whose work I first encountered as an undergraduate: I was in a teacher’s office, and he was looking at some bits of poems for what I thought might turn into a verse novel. A particular phrase made him pull down a volume from the shelf and open to this poem, “Mothers and Daughters.” The longer I’ve spent with this poem the more astonished I am at its simplicity, and the way in which is simply works. Though I doubt I will ever write a verse novel now, I’m grateful that this long-aborted project brought me the gift of this poem. 

The whole poem is a single sentence—a difficult feat, not made much easier for being just eight lines long; the lines are short, with two or three “beats” per line. There is enough regularity here that the poem may, overall, be considered formal, though enough variations in that regularity that the suddenly straight iambic motion of the last two lines have the effect of great propulsion; similarly, the rhyme scheme—a balladic ABCB—is only gentle in the first stanza of the poem, as the slant rhyme of “forty” and “beauty” hits the ear as intentional, but also loose. That slant rhyme also plays out something of the poet’s vision of the relationship between “forty” and “beauty”: in this poem they don’t quite meet. As such when the second and final stanza uses the full rhyme in conjunction with the regular meter, the whole poem falls—seemingly effortlessly—into place.

So much here, too, is carried in the adjectives: there is nothing flashy about the words Campbell chooses, but they all feel terribly apt and irreplaceable. The once-“cruel girls” are held up against their “subtle daughters”; it is not just the eyes of these daughters but their stare that is “blue” (a hue that, of course, has both visual and emotional registers) and “cool” with surprise; against the subtlety and coolness of the new generation, the “anxious mothers” almost bristle, so that when these two generations are collapsed into one attitude, the tensions rise even as the poem locks into place. The girls who stare at their mothers “with their mothers eyes” presumably bear the cruelty and anxiety of their mother, while those mothers reflect coolness and a hint of mockery. The poem is elegant and taut, but in its eight lines presents the complexity of the relationship depicted with a startling clarity that is anything but simple.

A selection of David Campbell’s poems is available in the volume Hardening the Light, published in 2006 by Indigo.

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Mothers and Daughters

The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;

And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise,
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers’ eyes.

—David Campbell

Poems Revisited: “A Consumer’s Report” by Peter Porter

When Peter Porter died in 2010, I found that many friends outside Australia—who regularly read poetry—were not at all familiar with his work. I shared with them a small number of his poems to whet their appetites: among those I chose was “A Consumer’s Report,” which proved a hit among friends and students alike. This poem initiates the reader into its modus operandi from the outset, with the opening tercet putting the joke on the table. The reason the poem works derives from the fact that Porter sustains this joke for the duration of the poem, and then, when the reader believes the joke has been stretched to its ultimate end, the poet adds yet another surprise.

One of the main pleasures of poetry is that it returns the reader to consider the precision of language itself. In day-to-day life we’re used to hearing words mangled or emptied of their meaning through overuse. (Don Watson’s book Weasel Words tracks such emptiness in the language of management at length.) At times, when corporate or political-speak gets excessive airplay, I can’t help but feel we really are living in the world of Orwell’s “Newspeak.” In “A Consumer’s Report” Porter reminds us that even language that seems to have been repurposed by the corporate world can in fact be reclaimed and renewed. Often this reclamation can happen simply through the application of a set of familiar terms to a surprising new context: this is exactly what Porter does in his poem here, taking the language of marketing, and billing life itself as a commodity to be test-driven as you would a new car or skincare product. In so doing Porter wittily leads the reader both to examine the nature of the titular consumer’s report, but also prods his reader to a serious consideration of life itself.

Clearly our consumer has had a particular experience of life—life has, after all, been “gentle on the hands” of the writer; however the particularity of this example is countered by more general truths that all of us must face: none of us are aware, after all, just how long it will be until the built-in redundancy kicks in. Porter pulls apart familiar phrases—what does it mean to be “on the side of” life?—and places the terms “market researcher” and “philosopher” on two sides of the same coin. This balancing act between terms we would never normally equate anticipates the poem’s end, in which Porter informs the reader that, when all is said and done, there is still another weighing act to be completed: the unnamed “competitive product” (ie. death) must be experienced for a true comparison to take place. This final move drops us into a more serious realm, and we realise that the comic tone we have enjoyed until now has always had a sting to it. In fact, the ending prompts the reader to begin again: and that’s what the best poems do. Invite you to experience them over and over.

“A Consumer’s Report” appears in Peter Porter’s The Rest of the Flight: Selected Poems.

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A Consumer’s Report

The name of the product I tested is Life,
I have completed the form you sent me
and understand that my answers are confidential.

I had it as a gift,
I didn’t feel much while using it,
in fact I think I’d have liked to be more excited.
It seemed gentle on the hands
but left an embarrassing deposit behind.
It was not economical
and I have used much more than I thought
(I suppose I have about half left
but it’s difficult to tell)—
although the instructions are fairly large
there are so many of them
I don’t know which to follow, especially
as they seem to contradict each other.
I’m not sure such a thing
should be put in the way of children—
It’s difficult to think of a purpose
for it. One of my friends says
it’s just to keep its maker in a job.
Also the price is much too high.
Things are piling up so fast,
after all, the world got by
for thousand million years
without this, do we need it now?
(Incidentally, please ask your man
to stop calling me ‘the respondent’,
I don’t like the sound of it.)
There seems to be a lot of different labels,
sizes and colours should be uniform,
the shape is awkward, it’s waterproof
but not heat resistant, it doesn’t keep
yet it’s very difficult to get rid of:
whenever they make it cheaper they tend
to put less in—if you say you don’t
want it, then it’s delivered anyway.
I’d agree it’s a popular product,
it’s got into the language; people
even say they’re on the side of it.
Personally I think it’s overdone,
a small thing people are ready
to behave badly about. I think
we should take it for granted. If its
experts are called philosophers or market
researchers or historians, we shouldn’t
care. We are the consumers and the last
law makers. So finally, I’d buy it.
But the question of a ‘best buy’
I’d like to leave until I get
the competitive product you said you’d send. 

—Peter Porter

Poems Revisited: “The Art of Disappearing” by Sarah Holland-Batt

When Sarah Holland-Batt’s debut volume Aria appeared in 2008, it made a welcome addition to Australian poetry. This fully formed new voice gave readers a fully realised first book: among other things, the architecture of that book was a particular strength. The final poem “The Art of Disappearing” sends readers out of Aria with the mind opened. Reading its simple catalogue and seemingly artless style, my own phrase for my first encounter with this poem was that it “took the top of my head off.” Yet “The Art of Disappearing” is a quiet poem—this piece doesn’t contain the verbal fireworks of many memorable poems. However, it is from that very quietness that the poem gains its power.

With its echo of Yeats’s line “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold,” from the poem “The Second Coming” (a poem full of now-famous phrases) this poem holds not an apocalyptic vision, but instead a swelling melancholia at the inevitability of change, at the marching-on of time. The boldness of this poem is wrapped up in its simplicity and directness. Repetition forms a central part of the piece, and while repetition is a vital tool in all poetry—especially in lyric verse—the poet will normally repeat her language exactly only two or three times. Here, however, Holland-Batt repeats the borrowed phrase six times within the opening five lines of the poem, guaranteeing that when she does vary from this the phrase will linger on in the reader’s mind. This repetition is a gutsy move: it takes an assured poet to understand the rhythms of her own poem to the degree that she knows just how long she can string out that incantatory repetition. Adding to the incantatory effect of this repetition is the structure of the poem: nearly all lines are end-stopped, and most frequently this end-stop comes in the form of a period. With the line so frequently equalling the sentence, the poem is formed primarily from simple declarative statements; the second line, made of two complete sentences, initiates the reader into the form of the poem at the outset.

At the same time that it draws on repetition and the unit of the line-as-sentence, Holland-Batt names an entire world. The image of the moon breaking on the fencepost of the opening line creates the distance between earth and the heavens. The move to desire and memory create the emotional register of the poem. Then the poem veers toward a more specific situation and sensibility as the poet writes “The house you grew up in: its eaves; its attic will not hold,” and follows this with still lives, Botticellis, “white peaches in the bowl.” The world described is as curated as those still lives—until it is not. Here the poem turns as it notes that “Something is always about to happen,” such that there can be “no stay or wait or keep.” Change enters the poem in the form of marriage, re-naming, and from the artful vision of still lives, the messier debris of “the car idling” and “scraps of paper” enter—these are the things that “go on.” The “dark water” that “flows endlessly on” at the poem’s—and the book’s—close is both akin to and the opposite of the scarf of sunshine mentioned earlier. This dark water is the strange material we gather about us as the world itself flows endlessly on, beyond the poem. And yet, despite this seemingly bleak exit, I personally find that each time I read “The Art of Disappearing” I feel, perhaps oddly, only the beauty of the poem, and a new openness to the beauty of the complicated world. The naming of abstracts—desire, memory, later pain—combined with Holland-Batt’s images create an emotional openness that transcends melancholy.

“The Art of Disappearing” appears in Sarah Holland-Batt’s collection Aria, available from University of Queensland Press.

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The Art of Disappearing 

The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.
Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.
The house you grew up in: its eaves; its attic will not hold.
The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.
The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.
Something is always about to happen.
You get married, you change you name,
and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.
It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;
imperatives will not still it—no stay or wait or keep
to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.
So tell the car idling in the street to go on;
tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on
tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.
It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,
that means the days are getting shorter.
And the dark water flows endlessly on.

—Sarah Holland-Batt

Poems Revisited: “Liam” by Judith Beveridge

When all is said and done, poets love words. I have read many poems that were clearly written in part to catalogue a beloved lexicon, a set of “shoptalk,” and these poems are almost always in some way playful; fanciful. I have also contemplated that old saw about the Eskimos many a time: that they have many, many terms for snow. What I enjoy so much about Judith Beveridge’s poem “Liam” touches on both these ideas, because Beveridge provides a partial catalogue of winds, and that catalogue inverts this idea about a single language inventing all these words for different characteristics of a weather phenomenon, and shows instead a language inheriting these words for winds that vary in their character all over the globe. A samoon is not a sirocco.  Beyond this, the poem exists as more than this catalogue of winds: it is also a portrait of Liam, the new boy on this fishing boat that is central to the narrative sequence of poems at the heart of Judith Beveridge’s Storm and Honey. As a portrait, though, the poem stands alone, even as the other characters present through Storm and Honey stand at the edges.

In my imagination, the act of fishing is a leisurely pursuit—but those tranquil hours of waiting for the fish to bite are simply my own naive association when I think of anglers. Not so in this and other poems in Storm and Honey, which follows commercial, rather than leisured, fishermen. “Liam” forces the reader to forget any idyllic ideas at the outset, so that the slowed pace that enters mid-poem is truly a surprise. Not only does the speaker “drive [his] blade into the fish’s anal opening” (how can one not be arrested by such a seemingly anti-poetic opening?) but he also drives the reader into an uncompromising poem that literally offers up the guts, and becomes not only a portrait of Liam, but also of the speaker. There is a distinctive character to the language: the specifics of the fish bodies around which the speaker is so comfortable (“I can smell/ the urea turning into ammonia”), the easy slang (“pissing against the pylons”; “Liam reckons”; “I hope Grennan doesn’t sack him”) and directness—“But I like Liam.” Beyond these features, the poem is distinctly physical, as the speaker drives, cuts, lifts, scoops, pulls, showing the reader a this bustle of activity. 

Until that bustle slows. Halfway into the poem a stillness takes us by surprise, as “the silence goes on” amid the thoughts of our narrator, and Liam’s musings breaks into that silence. In contrast to the active speaker, Liam appears passive, looking up at the clouds, revealing his wish to lie down or to sit in different places in the world as his beloved winds blow through. This ritardando allows the reader to see the control Beveridge has over the musical and narrative pace of the poem.

This slowed interval of wind-talk stretches into the moment the poem resumes work, as the speaker suddenly tells us “I sever another fish’s head…” as, all of a sudden, he too stops to watch, likening the pelican who comes to take away the fish guts to a windsock raised by the breeze.

“Liam” appears in Judith Beveridge’s collection Storm and Honey, available from Giramondo. 

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Liam 

I drive my blade into the fish’s anal opening,
cutting through the belly all the way to the gills.
I lift out the innards then scoop away the reddish
brown kidney line from along the backbone.
I cut across the belly flap, pull the fillet back,
run my knife right through to the thick silver
skin on the fish’s underside. I look over at Liam,
the new boy. Already I can tell he’s ruined
the afternoon’s catch of wobbegong. Grennan
had told him to clean under the backbone,
to remove all the blood and spleen, but he
hasn’t drained all the blood out and I can smell
the urea turning into ammonia. Girolamo,
the fishmonger, when he smells the pungent
odour, will not buy our catch. Liam has left
the cleaning tables and is down by the shore
pissing against the pylons and the truck tyres
used to stop ferries banging into the wharf.
Yesterday when we were cleaning, we found
a bottle of old bourbon in a bull shark’s
stomach. The top was starting to corrode,
the label to dissolve. Later I found Liam
behind the boatshed snoring, giving off
loud burps. He reckons he once worked
with a fisherman who opened up a mako
and found a roll of lino and a tin drum.
But I like Liam. We don’t talk much, we just
think our thoughts while the silence goes on.
Sometimes he’ll look up at the clouds
riding quickly overhead and he’ll tell me
about winds: virazon, zondo, bayamo,
chinook, samoon, sirocco, tramontana.
He knows which shores, deserts, oceans
and mountains they all blow in from,
which ones can reach hurricane force, how
some will blow around the planet for months.
He tells me one day he wants to lie down
on the pampas grasslands of Uruguay
just when the cold pamper follows the path
of a depression as it tracks up from the south
bringing its squall lines and heavy rain;
to follow the cold blast of the williwaw
into the Straits of Magellan; or sit where
the dust-laden leveche brings the tang
of mint, goats and lemons from Morocco
into southern Spain. I know Liam will leave
one day on a steady breeze, go somewhere
inland. I hope Grennan doesn’t sack him.
I sever another fish’s head, throw the guts
to the pelicans, watch one of them lift as lightly
as a windsock as it heads for the sea.

—Judith Beveridge

Poems Revisited: “The President” by John Mateer

I imagine there are moments in everyone’s lives in which they experience or witness an event that seem so highly distilled that it is already something like a poem or other work of art. That was my first reaction to reading John Mateer’s “The President,” the opening poem of his latest collection Southern Barbarians. And yet, these moments that seem to arrive as poems are difficult to write: while “The President” has the light touch of anecdote, that light touch is deceptive. It is easy to miss the skill it takes to write a poem that exists almost as a single breath.

Xanana Gusmão, the president alluded to in the title of the poem, goes only by his first name—and how much power can be derived from the choice not to name him in full! As simply “Xanana” he is more approachable, that approach more personal. Yet, with the title solely pointing to his presidential position, this poetic subject also grows: he is his role in this moment in Melbourne. Mateer’s mingling of the person and the office is deft, and it is important to the shape of the work that the president does not speak until the final line, though of course his speech is the occasion for the poem.

This poem, too, is utterly of the moment: the poem is international in fascinating ways. The president of East Timor, one the world’s newest nations (well, in this latest iteration of its statehood, most recently free of the imposed rule of Indonesia) is sitting in a city thousands of miles away—in another nation famed for it’s supposed “youth.” Yet the old world of empire lingers: the President wants to write a Lusíadas for his nation. The spectre of Portugal looms. There have been other president-poets—Senghor, Cesaire—and they too have wished to write poems that would contribute to and shape a national identity. Mateer’s president reminds us that in fact poetry can be—is—important to how we think of ourselves in the world.

And then there is that final line, the reported speech of the president. First, Mateer has shaped it, giving the line, if you will, a double caesura by the addition of the words, “he mused.” “Mused” is perhaps the most charged verb used in a poem of deceptive simplicity. Musing (ah, the echo of the Muse!) gestures toward the uncertainty that the poem’s close captures.

Finally, of course, there is speech itself, the occasion from which the poem clearly arose for its author. That search for a rhyme, familiar to many a poet (even those who work largely within free verse—which so often includes internal rhymes), without the naming of those potential rhymes: badness; madness; or, perhaps, gladness. The restraint here, the decision to leave just this word sadness, lingering for the reader, is what creates the poem’s power.

“The President” appears in John Mateer’s collection Southern Barbarians, available from Giramondo.  

Author photograph by Monica Esteves Alonso.

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The President

Xanana was on a chair outside in the Melbourne cold,
puffing on a cigarette and again trying to translate the words
he intended to recite before his speech that night.
His biographer sat with him, prepared for his chain-smoking
and with the knowledge that he had already published a
           few cantos
of what he imagined could be a Lusíadas for East Timor.
She was hoping he wasn’t struggling with that: her teeth
           were chattering.
What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?

—John Mateer

Poems Revisited: “Geography Lessons” by Maria Takolander

In “Geography Lessons” Maria Takolander produces a memorable lyric: the poem opens her first volume of poetry, Ghostly Subjects, and is the perfect introduction to that collection—a debut of careful, flinty poems. The poem is also a breath of fresh air on its own, a clarion moment. The “brittle”-ness, the “colossal anger” of the poem are matched by “heart,” by the “personal.” The resulting poem is skilfully built, giving quiet poise to its emotional tenor.

A great deal of pleasure can be derived from the form of the poem, as the poem performs a theme and variations. This form is determined by the opening “How” of each tercet, and the geography Takolander takes her readers through is both that of natural landscapes—mountain, forest, river, ocean—and also emotional terrain. With lines roughly the same length throughout, and each tercet comprising a single sentence, the combination of the anaphoric pattern of the openings and the consistent length produces a natural rhythm for the poem. Though short, by the midpoint the reader has been initiated into the poem’s rhythms and can sense the break coming at the end of each tercet.

These breaks are part of the poem’s success: the poem works through accumulation, and as the poet makes her statements, each has an aphoristic quality. The opening lines, “How a mountain can forsake you for the sky,/ casting away your heart/ like a goat kicking at a brittle stone,” themselves are lapidary in quality. The lines are not a brittle stone, but one smooth, worn: the lines ring with the certainty of someone who has been forsaken (a sensation oh-so-familiar to many of us). And though each tercet takes a different subject, and could arguably be its own poem, the repetitions in form and the combined effect of these “Geography Lessons” are such that the poem moves the reader, like the writer, into belief that “it is all something personal.” That personal experience takes you from ocean back to mountain, and onward to experience Takolander’s personal geography all over again.

“Geography Lessons” appears in Takolander’s Ghostly Subjects, available from Salt.

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Geography Lessons

How a mountain can forsake you for the sky,
     casting away your heart
     like a goat kicking at a brittle stone.

How a forest can feed you with its air,
     tenuous fusion of night and day,
     until you think it might be enough.

How a river can feel small and dangerous,
      calling you by your secret name,
     the one only your mirror knows.

How an ocean can rage at the moon
     until you adopt its colossal anger as your own
      and live believing it is all something personal.

—Maria Takolander

Poems Revisited: “The Power-line Incarnation” by Les Murray

A teacher and friend, Laura Kasischke, introduced me to the work of poetry critic Owen Barfield, in particular a phrase he uses that describes the readerly experience of poetry. Barfield suggests that the reader, when encountering a great poem, experiences a “felt change of consciousness.” Upon hearing this phrase I instantly felt a jolt of recognition: this new consciousness described my experience of so many poems. This phrase also, to me, immediately suggested one of those most profound encounters with a different consciousness—that of Les Murray’s thoroughly electrified poem, “The Powerline Incantation.”

While Les Murray writes in a thoroughly Australian diction of Australian places and experiences, he constantly surprises. He has also made the crossover, the rare poet who pleases on both the European and American sides of the Atlantic. Despite being lauded internationally, he now spends most of his time in rural Bunyah, NSW. However his poetry is anything but simply bucolic: at his best—and he is frequently at his best—his work has a distinctive tang to it.

To read “The Powerline Incantation” is to share a poetic electric shock. Though the poem starts with a straightforward phrase—“When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof”—this serves only to orient the reader before a bewildering ride begins. From the moment “hands bloom teeth shouted” (note the way the phrase slows the reader down after the easy pace of the opening line, and how its lack of punctuation creates multiple meanings) the poem takes on a rich strangeness, enhanced by rhythmic pyrotechnics, syntactic play, inventive metaphor and a wide field of reference. Australia is there—Tooma, Geehi, Anembo—but so too is the rest of the world. Mozart and Johnny Cash collide, alongside Rigel, the Apaches. Internal half rhymes and consonances lend music to the whole: the “teeth” of the second line chime (imperfectly) with “seized” which ends the line; “slam” and “farms” play off each other; “copper links” and “fusebox” and “mixers” echo each other slightly, slantly. These gestures, alongside rich alliteration create a full, rich sound world. The success in the sound of the poem allows Murray to make disparate references: these references, sonically, belong together. This is a poem that makes use of so many of the poet’s tools, and the result is that here more is more.

And so the added power when the poem closes in simply voiced but profound words on the nature of “the present god.” The sizzle of humanity falls into a quietude of meditation, as the poem performs its own ritardando into stillness. 

“The Power-line Incarnation” appears in Les Murray’s Selected Poems, available from Black Inc.

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The Powerline Incantation

When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized
held back from this life
                                       O flumes     O chariot reins
you cover me with lurids deck me with gaudies feed
my coronal    a scream sings in the air
above our dance    you slam it to me with farms
that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend
Tooma and Geehi freak and burr through me
rocks fire-trails damwalls mountain-ash trees slew
to darkness threw me    I zap them underfoot
with the swords of my shoes
                                               I am receiving mountains
piloting around me Crackenback    Anembo
the Fiery Walls    I make a hit in towns
I’ve never visited: smoke curls lightbulbs pop grey
discs hitch and slow    I plough the face of Mozart
and Johnny Cash    I bury and smooth their song
I crack it for copper links and fusebox spiders
I call my Friend from the circuitry of mixers
whipping cream for a birthday    I distract the immortal
Inhuman from hospitals
                                       to sustain my jazz
and here is Rigel in a glove of flesh
my starry hand discloses smoke, cold Angel.

Vehicles that run on death come howling into
our street with lights a thousandth of my blue
arms keep my wife from my beauty    from my species
the jewels in my tips
                                  I would accept her in
blind white remarriage    cover her with wealth
to arrest the heart    we’d share Apache leaps
crying out Disyzygy!
                                  shield her from me, humans
from this happiness I burn to share    this touch
sheet car    live ladder    wildfire garden shrub—
away off I hear the bombshell breakers thrown
diminishing me    a meaninglessness coming
over the circuits
                           the god’s deserting me
but I have dived in the mainstream    jumped the graphs
I have transited the dreams of crew-cut boys named Buzz
and the hardening music
                                         to the big bare place
where the strapped-down seekers, staining white clothes, come

to be shown the Zeitgeist
                                          passion and death my skin
my heart all logic    I am starring there
and must soon flame out
                                         having seen the present god
It who feels nothing    It who answers prayers.

—Les Murray (1977)