Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 199 Winter 2010 Main Posts / Reviews Villian Pam Brown Justin Clemens Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets ISBN 9780980517958, $19.95 The book’s title is a homonym for François Villon, the fifteenth-century French poet, thief and vagabond who died at thirty-two and who famously wrote ballads in French criminal slang. His work, once translated into English in the nineteenth century, was frowned upon by those with loftier poetic standards. Clemens makes inventive translations of Villon’s irreverent and often lewd poetry. ‘Ballade of Fried Tongues’ is particularly histrionic as it hurls curses at flapping gossip derived from envy: ‘In scabrous wash of lepers’ legs;/From feet and boots, the scraps and dregs;/In viper’s blood and poisoned pride,/In foxes’, wolves’, and badgers’ smeg,/Let all those jealous tongues be fried!’ The first section of the book, ‘Whirl’, circles around many forms from villanelle to couplet, from free and experimental to wordplay. The poems are melodramatic, atmospheric, hallucinatory. There are some villainous and violent thoughts and scenes – dreams and acts that include hangovers and very funny art critiques. Clemens has an affinity with the dark mythical underworld and he writes his sonnets to Orpheus. There is a kind of antic energy in the poems. There is little elegy here – anxiety and ludic tone dominate sweeter thoughts. As Peter Conrad remarked recently, ‘Art has a mission to offend, which is why the French decadents set out to épater le bourgeois [to shock the middle class]’ and under the post-avant beauties of Justin Clemens’ very cognisant intelligence there lurks more than a smidgin of French decadence. Clemens ups the ante in Ozpo when it comes to both topic and technique as he oxygenates traditional form for today’s readers. Pam Brown Pam Brown has published many chapbooks, pamphlets and full collections of poetry, most recently Stasis Shuffle (Hunter Publishers, 2021). She lives in a south Sydney suburb on reclaimed swampland on Gadigal Country. More by Pam Brown Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 7 First published in Overland Issue 228 1 February 20233 February 2023 Reviews This is where the rat bastard poem comes in Dan Hogan Rats will be found wherever nonsense presented as sense becomes the authority. Such is the cornerstone of anything organised along lines of capital: bureaucracies, workplace hierarchies, real estate, aspiration culture, institutions, ruling class artifice, governments, etcetera. Wherever there is capital there are rats—hoarding creatures, capital’s henchmen. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 14 December 202225 January 2023 Poetry The moral risk of taking things too seriously: on Gareth Morgan’s When A Punk Becomes A Spunk Elese Dowden In his review of Lucy Van’s The Open, Gareth Morgan writes that Van writes 'against the impulse to ponder dutifully about the sins of the past and present.' This fucked me up for some time. What is it to ponder dutifully? But perhaps more importantly, how do we ponder in a way that's more … metal?