Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 195
winter 2009
ISBN 978-0-9805346-2-7
published 21 May 2009

NOT WHAT IT MEANS: WHAT IT IS

Heather Taylor Johnson reviews recent poetry

• Ouyang Yu: The Kingsbury Tales
  Brandl & Schlesinger, $24.95
• Christopher Kelen: After Meng Jiao: responses to the Tang poet 
  Virtual Artists Collective, $29.95
• David Brooks: The Balcony 
  University of Queensland Press, $24.95
• Bel Schenk: Ambulances and Dreamers
  Wakefield Press, $19.95
• John Jenkins: Growing up with Mr Menzies
  John Leonard Press, $24.95

We live in a globalised society, and the ethnic differences surrounding us every day are obvious. With so many accents and languages and colours and costumes, it seems appropriate that we rethink what it is to be Australian. Not what it means: what it is.

Ouyang Yu in The Kingsbury Tales examines the question with an almost nihilistic approach. So often in migrant poetry the mother country becomes romanticised and the adopted country idealised – or the other way round. This creates a situation in which place attains a mythic status, as poems are drenched in either loss or discovery. Ouyang Yu doesn’t follow that common route. He trudges through absurd translations and wades in murky, prejudiced waters to forge his own path of migrant writing: the nowhere man. His heroes are not caught up in memory or in the moment or even, as one might imagine, between two cultures with two languages in two different continents. They are nowhere men, and they seem to value very little beyond observation. In ‘A Comparative Tale’, he writes:

Over there, life is simple, law is complex, theory is unintelligible
Over here, life is complex, people are simple, their English is half intelligible
Over there things are through, people are not through
Over here things are blocked, minds are blocked, sort of
Over there, when you come to think of it, money is the language
Over here, when you come to think of it, culture corrupts
Over there, birds sing ugly in the parks
Over here, birds sing beautifully in the cages

The tone and content of these poems are often bitter, damning both China and Australia. This is nothing new for Ouyang Yu and it surprises me I do not tire of it, but the explanation probably lies in his honesty and daring ingenuity. There is an enormous amount of research invested in this volume, which encourages us to see that issues of cultural disinheritance are of continuing relevance.

Ouyang Yu’s representation of himself as Australian is raw. He has no time to smell flowers or consider such clichés. His Australia is unfamiliar. For him, the case of ‘love it or leave it’, as Mr Howard once suggested, is too simplistic and fails to consider the complexities of the heart and mind, or the complexities of life-changing choices or everyday routines. But can we disassociate from our own feelings towards Australia to give Ouyang Yu’s work the attention it deserves? It may be a big ask for some. And it may just be the sort of reality-injection Australian poetry needs.

•

In after Meng Jiao, Christopher Kelen presents us with the image of the expatriate. Rather than write about his personal experiences – an obvious and well-travelled route – he gives us insight into a culture that has seduced him. Having adopted Macau as his home for the better half of the past decade, Kelen spent three years researching and translating the Tang dynasty poetry of Meng Jiao (b.751 – d.814), with help from his colleagues at the University of Macau, Hilda Tam and Amy Wong.

By refashioning the ancient poems of Meng Jiao for a contemporary reader, Kelen fuses the Eastern tradition of a spiritually in-tune poet with an identifiable Western and modern voice. The end result is this finely considered flow of responses to, or variations on, the nomadic and lamenting Chinese poet. Jiao writes in his ‘Song of Fidelity’:

no waves stirring in
her heart calm as water in a well.
Kelen responds in his ‘on female virtue’:
her heart still as well water
gurgle gurgle gone

So the poems are based upon Jiao’s original concepts, and some images and words remain intact, but they have a definite ‘Kit’ Kelen flavour. At times I became carried away with the meditational aspects of the poetry, where images of natural elements spoke for themselves (a traditional Eastern style), and then I felt inspired by the intellectualising of those natural elements (a modern Western style). Sometimes I didn’t see the value of the old style (there are a few Yoda-like instances: ‘precious shelter the new house is’), which found me wanting Kelen to spin the language towards the modern vernacular. Rather than enhance the inventiveness of this merging of styles, it seems too mannered.

In 792, and again in 793, Meng Jiao failed the Imperial examinations that would have won him a secure position in society (he eventually passed, but was given a position in the provinces, which he lost after several years). Forced into poverty, he lived as a wanderer and self-made guardian of mountains and rivers. His poems bemoan his public situation but they praise the beauty of the solitary life and show great admiration for his surrounding environment. He also exhibits a preoccupation with the profession of poet. Jiao’s fascination with the mountains and the changing of seasons works well in the hands of Kelen, also a traveller and a poet, exponentially increasing the readers’ understanding.

The book is filled with illustrations by Kelen, which also seem to have their origins in an ancient Chinese tradition but are recast in a modern, Western sensibility. Not only do they stress Kelen’s current passion, they are a delight as stand-alone drawings – an added bonus to an already rewarding book.

•

David Brooks was born in Australia, lived in Europe as a child and travels regularly to Slovenia. In The Balcony he has positioned himself as a man divided between two places, but this division makes him whole. He longs and desires without sadness or confusion. There is an overwhelming sense of joy in his ‘displacement’ (I am anxious even using this word, as ‘dis’ suggests the negative and Brooks’ work is its own unique breed of affirmation). His sense of place, whether about his homeland or his heartland, is simultaneously exotic and familiar. He is drawn to place sensually, as in ‘Australia’:

Dead heart?
Put your hand
down under,
feel
how wet.

‘Request’ is another example of how place can be erotic, but to cut that particular poem into quotable lines would be to mess with perfection – it is simply unforgettable.

To say The Balcony is made up of love poems for two very different lands would not be inappropriate but it would be incomplete. The Balcony is also a collection of love poems for a woman who inhabits both lands or – as some have suggested – for many women, perhaps past lovers of varying places, as well as a current love. I am not aware of another male Australian poet who writes love poems so poignantly. Brooks has even apologised (tongue-in-cheek) for his insistence upon love in the poem ‘Catullus 123′. Is there an unspoken rule among the literati that topics such as love (and we might as well throw in his other favourite themes: nature and animals) are too simplistic for intelligent poetry? Brooks says no, and he has me saying no in his – and poetry’s – defence. These love poems reflect not only a simultaneous male vulnerability and assuredness but also a humanistic need to rejoice. They transcend the personal – as, for example, in ‘Twelfth Night’, where the world around Brooks responds to his tenderness in turn:

later still
the Moon
saying something about the Earth,
the wind
asking the trees where you had gone.

In this collection, love is not just a single emotion, it is every emotion; and place is made up of more than geography and culture, it carries with it an undivided heart. A book like this skews the way we see the world because it suggests that we feel the world. And the world, in the deft hands of David Brooks, feels good.

•

Australians are intrepid travellers. Perhaps this is because we live on an island and the ocean is an obstacle to overcome. Bel Schenk, in Ambulances and Dreamers, is interested in the emotion produced by the desire for travel. To say it is a mix of excitement and solitude is too straightforward: those may be the basic ingredients of her poetry but it is more multifaceted than that.

Again and again, Schenk impressively captures the tedium of the solitary life, often with only a single line. In the poem ‘Solitude. This is not Lonely.’, the speaker predicts a newfound fear of spiders will overtake her, concluding with, ‘At last, something different to fear.’ This is a fine example of Schenk’s subtlety in her depiction of sorrow, which allows for a satisfying sadness, rather than one dripping with tears.

Much like her first collection, Urban Squeeze, though softer and stronger with maturity, Ambulances and Dreamers is rooted in the city. Her gentle streams are concrete footpaths leading to karaoke bars. Her birdsong is the music emitted from her headphones. Her signature tree is the flat in which she dwells with television set and essential nutrients. And if romantics are carried away by the wind, Schenk is carried away by subways, streetcars and aeroplanes. All of this creates an ordered chaos, so that Schenk cannot get lost. But she can lose herself. She is so fully conscious of time and of the inevitability of precious moments to disappear that she freeze-frames memories. Not one to over-sentimentalise, as in the poem ‘Birthday Dinner’, she forces herself to return to the real world, where time never stands still: ‘Please friends, spin me the urge to grow up’.

Ambulances and Dreamers, taken from a line from a Peter Bakowski poem, is no love affair with one city in particular. Yet no matter where she is, she seems at home. At times her lover is with her; at times they are in separate places. Either way, there is a noticeable distance and an undeniable closeness at once, as in ‘For the Details’:

I turn on my phone to call you,
my lovely you,
and leave one of those messages

I hope you’ll save forever.
Not because of the things I say
but because of how I say them.

You will hear accents and music
and the sound of raindrops landing
in the pauses of my speech.

Ambulances and Dreamers reads like an extended love song, though at times a broken record. There are too many headphones, too many imperatives towards film direction, and the food has a tendency to become an obvious link. It is difficult, then, to say what makes a strong thread in a collection and what becomes monotonous, because Schenk is as clever and intelligent as a poet can be, and still there is a sense of undue uniformity. But I am willing to forgive her, just as I am willing to wait. I suspect Schenk will soon push her way into all the Australian Best anthologies.

•

Not all Australians have an inclination towards the multinational and international. Those who read poetry still want to be reminded of the beauty and rareness of our own cities and country towns, of our own ancestors and contemporaries, and of our own unique characteristics and traditions. John Jenkins’ Growing up with Mr Menzies is one of those collections.

Jenkins plays with and examines memory. He is at his best when he deconstructs this process, as in ‘Grain’ and ‘Push This Wall Back’. In poems such as these, he allows his readers a glimpse of the speaker as a man who is trapped in history and in his childhood. We relate through a vicarious nostalgia, so that even if we do not recall the Menzies era (1949-1966), we can share in the experience – his memories become our own.

Conceptually, the work is outstanding, but the poem by poem execution is somewhat uninspiring. Jenkins stays true to simple forms, simple language and simple subject matter, which could be explained by his aim to rediscover his character’s childhood. This pushes the stronger poems into an incongruous light, so when the child, Felix Hayes, matures, and the poems therefore mature with him, we are left confused by the rhythm that has been lost. The jump from innocence to a reflective wisdom is too large. I cannot believe the shift is so clear-cut.

Still, the opening baby-looking-up poems and the closing man-looking-back poems are snapshots of quiet brilliance, and the he-says/she-says pieces of pure vernacular are inspired. They capture a family, a place and a time (though I had to question if all family members could be so equally ocker). The poems told from the point of view of Mr Menzies began promisingly, but they seemed to taper off into the merely factual. Of course I am dissecting here, and I am not sure that this collection would ask me to do that. As a whole, this is the sort of Australian poetry that traditionalists would love, and it is playful enough to capture a younger, more restless audience as well. In its entirety, Growing up with Mr Menzies is a distinctive work that should speak loudly to a multicultural nation grasping for folklore and roots.

Heather Taylor Johnson holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide in Creative Writing. She is a poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine and the author of Exit Wounds.
© Heather Taylor Johnson
Overland 195-winter 2009, p. 115

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