Review copies provided.
Poetry is the only whole thinking - Les Murray, being a tad essentialist.
Discuss. (Only kidding.) I'm commencing an irregular feature here, which you will see belongs to the plain-with-links school of poetry reviewing. My efforts are guided by the instructive and plain-speaking reviewers at the excellent online poetry magazine, foam:e, and by good poetry reviewers - well, everywhere. But especially by Derek Motion and Louise Waller, whose straight talking ways I admire.
Kate Middleton, Fire Season. Giramondo, 2009.
Kate Middleton is a Melbourne poet, musician and librettist. According to ABR, in 2002 she wrote the libretto for the opera Lapse, by Alan Lee, which was performed at Melba Hall and the Museum of Victoria.
In 2005 the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra premiered Natalie Williams's orchestral suite Scheherezade's Nights based on her poems.
In the spare, sinewy title poem of this collection she suggests, with some clairvoyance, that fire is 'something about heroism and the weight of stone /Something about ash.'
Her poem, 'Rainbow's End', published in this collection, won the 2006 Bruce Dawe poetry prize and you can read it here.
This is her first book of poetry, though she is widely published - these two poems on the ABR website are both in this collection, whereas 'Dispatches', at Cordite, is not. Clearly there was plenty to select from - the volume comprises 36 poems and one suite.
The arrangement of the poems reflects the publishing process - they have all clearly appeared as solo items, or maybe in the occasional duet. Nonetheless there are recurring preoccupations with old American film stars, minotaurs, satin, Italy, flowers and love reticulated through classical and literary heroes' lives. The poem 'Desdemona', sitting between a minotaur and a film star, is, like the play, really about Othello, and stunning:
He sings: gentle Moorish notes.
Discerns: the fineness of Canterbury lace. (Who
evern dreamed of such a man?)
Lowering hand over flame
enclosing the fire
within.
A special pleasure
and squalor,
blood in the fingertips. Pain
is not pain. Put out
the light.
It is not surprising that a graduate of composition might allow images to reverberate through her first collection, like counterpoint. As with most contemporary poetry, it is necessary to make imaginative leaps sometimes (and here I agree with Derek Motion, writing of Michael Farrell here, that this is not always an easy thing to do, but that nonetheless we should try.)
The poems I enjoyed the most were:
'Fire Season', the sly humour of 'Morning Sonnet', all the film star poems which are very dry, 'Scheherazade's Nights', though I do not understand why bullets are indulged in section 4, 'The Lovers' Holocaust', 'Your Feet', and 'Penelope on the Night of Odysseus' Homecoming'.
There are a couple of poems with wanting at their core that are remarkable, and while a trifle overdecorative ( probably the whole point), 'On A Bronzino in the Uffizi, Florence', finishes with a clever flourish arising from what must have been an irresistible line to play with, if it's original (help me out here, if you know! who does this sound like?):
Her eyes
enumerate a decalogue of sorrows
In another humorous poem, Fat Ben Jonson, she speaks wittily of the "slender line", and certainly is able to cast a wider range of muscular phrases than that undernourished description might suggest.
I'll leave you with the enjoyable thought of this not so new poet counting down that decalogue:
great riches and heavy fabrics, silence,
soft lips, ribbons and rings, books and bows,
white knuckles and eyes looking down the centuries
that never shed a tear.
Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Giramondo, 2009.
To Mr Aitken, then - this is his fourth collection and though I have read some reviews I am not familiar with his earlier books. Works in this collection have appeared in a whole swathe of publications from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia and the US.
Of particular merit within this book is a long suite of poems about Cambodia. Aitken introduces the accounts of French colonial diarists as more than simply padding in his Cambodian poems – that of naturalist Henri Mouhot is a rich reworking, even though Aitken claims:
Let’s be modest, your notes were
hasty, rough, with no claim to any merit
but to record the truth.
Destined as good books are
to see the light.
And also destined, I think, to give Aitken a poem where he can revisit l'Indochine:
These days it is not so easy
to discover anything
or to re-discover anything
let alone die looking...
Now we will know how the hunter
was once truly beautiful…
Though he is quick to counter Mouhot’s seductive influence with a brief homage to the deeply cynical trade commissioner Louis de Carne, who predicted India would fall into the hands of Australians:
…I could write all night in my tent
Cobwebbed in ennui and
Sucking on the leg bone of an iguana,
Or recline under the implacable serenity of the heavens,
The all-powerful constraints
Of influences so fatal to human personality
That thought dies away by degrees
Like a flame in a vacuum.
(You can read the whole poem and another, 'Francais', here.)
There is almost nothing of landmines here save the fearsome 'The Scream', but chilling echoes of cruelty are everywhere – try ‘The Wearer of Amulets’ on for size. This suite of poems (has it been published on its own?) builds tenaciously into an indictment of the '70s reign of terror in Cambodia, punctuated by a curious set of aubades (no less than six of them), probably worth reading in sequence themselves, in one of which Aitken wearily complains:
There are poets you know
who hardly sleep.
Your method is different.
The last poem in this sequence, addressed to a Cambodian writer as the person speaking throughout these poems leaves the country, suggests that not enough people can speak of the terror even now (he was last in Cambodia to work on these poems in 2008). The writer he addresses was married off, "let's say at gunpoint":
To forget or not to,
to write or not to – therefore live –
to forgive the monster
is this impossible question
Those who do not read
are still with us
and so few of you who write
with any skill or beauty
We move forward all the same, dear friend
back and forward
across the moat
one more time.
The opening sequence is titled Broken/Unbroken (echoing Jill Jones' prize-winning collection Broken/Open) and contains a poem on fire 'in the Sydney style' in which he pays tribute to Robert Adamson's denims, a poem about relatives and war, a beautiful, resigned poem on Gallipoli ('Ionian'), and the pellucid and quite mysterious 'Force Zero'.
Crossing Lake Toba contains other poems about South-East Asia - Malaysia, Singapore and post 12/02 Bali all accounted for at various points in their histories, as well as a great nine page conversation in tercets with his mother about the niceties of a retiring life in Cairns.
Though I did not, one might read the Cambodian poems first, and then work back - the intensity of that suite certainly lends its power to rereadings of the whole collection. I'm sure it's a part of Eighth Habitation I will visit again. Aitken has a travel and poetry blog with many photos of his Cambodian sojourn, here.
Kate Middleton, Fire Season: Adam Aitken, Eighth Habitation. Both from Giramondo Publishing, 2009.
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