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8/10/2019 Four Books Five Poets
1/3
Four
Books,
Five
Poets
Pam
Brown
S.
K. Kelen:
Trans-Sumatran
Highway
and
other
poems
(polonius
press,
$rZ.g
S).
Ouyang
Yu: Songs
of
the
Last
Chinese Poet
(Wild
Peony,
$rs).
John Kinsella:
The
Hunt(Fremantle
Arts
Centre Press,
$r6.gs).
Miriel Lenore:
travelling
alone
together&
louise
Cnsp:
Ruby
Camp
(Spinifex
Press,
$rg.gS).
ouR vEARS
AGo,
as a
memo
to my
lT-obsessed
Iibrary
co-workers,
I
pinned
S. K.
Kelen's
poem
'The
Information
Superhighway'to
the
office
wall.
Maybe, one
day,
we
would
all
work from on-line
homes
-
and
heed
the
poem's
warning:
My
house is
a city
state.
Outdoors
there's
a weird
fog
I
don'twantto go
outin.
F
ore sts are
flattene
d
to
fuel
computerfadories,
the
trees
are routed
once &for
all.
Whenthe lasttiger
inthe
wild
died
the tigers
in
the zoo
just vanished.
There's
a drawing
of a tiger
on the cover
of Trans-
Sumatran
Highway
-
a
reminder
of its
probable
im-
minent
extinction.
Various
other
animals,
reptiles
and
birds traverse
backyards, paddocks
and
jungles
in
this book.
Steve Kelen
is
an enthusiastic
traveller
and ap-
plies
wry
analytic
acumen to
travel-experiences
as
in
the
final stanzaof.
'The
Ramayana':
Blood rivers
run
into
the
sea.
Turtle
soup dreams
of
revenge.
Dragons champ
attheir leashes,
cr az
e d buffalo
e s
stamp e de
But everyone
isforgiven.
Volcanoes
chuckle.
Frogs
roar
louder
and
louder
kick
starting a
generator.
Et
e
rnitlt's
g
r
e e n
t e
r
r ac e s :
g
e
ck
o e s' I au
ght
e
r.
A
goldenfrog
sitting
on a doorframe
means
storms
of
fortune.
I order
another
drink atthe
lungle Inn
to
celebrate
Freedom
Day
and
the
good
luck godsfly
to Timor
Timur.
These poems
generously
open
up
numinous
and
galactic
worlds,
enrich
suburban
domestici
( They
began
as each
other's
armchair/in
endless
embrace/evolving
to
a
sofa & a
desk,
afar/
but
in
same
room ), revise poetic
history
('shelley
Heaven'),
fire
political
concern
(Koori
ghosts
at
Coorong, nuclear
fission
at
Hiroshima,
Russian
struction of
Chechnya),
all with
pungent
humor
insight.
S.
K.
Kelen
ranges
through these
expans
realms
and sometimes
enters
the
more
quietly
p
found
as
in
the clear
pathos
of
'Goodbyel
which
fa
wells
a
friend
who
has died:
Everyone's
responsible
for
everything
now there
are
onlyfeathers
left
so
kiss
the lightning,
atickettothe
stars.
The
sunbeams
have
arrived
Expatriate
Chinese
poet
Ouyang
Yu's discurs
monologues
from
a
sick
manfrom asia ,disgruntl
disappointed
and deracinated
by
the
'west',
a
chronicle of despair.
Ouyang
Yu has high
expe
tions
of himself
and of
poetry
in
a
country
that
pla
scant
value on
poetry.lt's
the
wrong place
-
mak
the
subject
doubly
displaced.
He
identifies
so
backward
aspects
of
materiallst
Australian
cult
- probably
I
should
start
playing
tattslotto/or
buy
raffle
tickets/like
the
stupid
australians
or
australi
chinese and
the
way bqllying
is an
unchalleng
norm
-
that
australianboys
or
girls
sang
ching
ch
chinaman/and
say
fuck
or idiots or nick
off or sh
get
lost/and
never
get punished/that
chinese boys
thathere
too.
As
is
usual
in
confessional
poetry
this
multip
narrator
speaks
as
a
victim
involved in
a
process
le
ing
to
cathartic
self-destruction,
rebellion
or ang
For
Ouyang
Yu
there's
a therapeutic
efficacy in th
monologues. A rant
against literary
editors is
shr
.
. .
p
oetry / r
ej e de d thr ough/the
ar s ehole
s of
lit.
ma
(i
me
an
litte r
e d mag
g
ots)
in the n
ext c e ntury o r s
o
/l
kill all
the
editors/and
publishfiom
headtop/now y
want minimalism/
you
dickhead/that's
what you
minim
ali z e
y
our s e
lf
into.
It's
an embittered view
seeing
mostly anomie.
E
spring,
usually
a
cliched symbol
of
renewal,
rs
depre
ing- spring
is
now
deepinits
owndespair/shapedlike
8/10/2019 Four Books Five Poets
2/3
of
history
and general
dislocation
that
Aussie
dolts
endure
-
it being
only zro years
since
setilement.
There's
a
filmic
element
to
John
Kinsella's
Ifte
Hunt,
suggesting
golden-filtered
depictions
of vast
landscape
-'Days
of Heaven',
maybe,
or'Witness'.
But
it's
Western
Australia
and
it's
a
period
film
-
the
time
seems
like
an
age
ago.
Perhaps
it's
because
in
my
ur-
banity
I
link
pastoralists
with
ABC-TV's'Landline' or
native
title
discourse
and
know
litile
of
the actual
Iives
of
wheat
farmers
that
these poems
seem
so
powerful.
The
language
of
this book
is necessarily
straight-
forward
(unlike
Kinsella's po-mo
mode)
in
order
to
transport
the
dark
content.
As
George
Steiner
says,
these
poems
are
narratives
of feeling
comprised
of
many
stories.
They
are
also
often
metaphoric.
In
'Echidna'the
poet
and
a farmer
track
an echidna
but
lose
track
and
wander
in
amnesiac circles:
. .
.
exhuming
the
deeply
choric question
of
rendering
our
meanderings
into
prose,
into
idle
chatterto
accompany
afew
beers
in
the
pub
that
night
Kinsella's
penchant
for
the
pastoral
is
brilliantly
in
this
fantastic
catalogue
of
death-filled
in
the wheatfields. Its
almost-gothic undertone
enhanced
bythe
use
of
slightlyold-fashionedwords
bier'
rather
than'coffin','husbandry','the
plenty'.
Here,
are
buried
alive
by
falling
into
wheat
silos,
mice
are
preserved
in
superphosphate,
packs
of wild
dogs
attack
sheep,
kangaroos
fight
off
rip
apart
domestic
dogs,
emus
are tripped
and
brutally
slaughtered
by
semi-automatic
rifle
rabbits
are
shot
and
dragged
to
trail
scent
for
capture
oflarger
beasts,
entrapped
cats
chew
off
paws
to
free
themselves.
Dogs'corpses,
stillborn
mangyfoxes
hunted
out,
snakes
decapitated
shovels,
a rabbiter's
suicide
in a
tin
humpy,
the
of a
drunken
student
prank
turning
into
a
at
a bush
ball,
weird
religious
ceremonies
black
moons,
Iightning
striking
wandoo
trees.
schoolboy
poet
thinks
of
Christo
when
he
has
to
the
hay
bales
and
knows
that
soon
he,ll
these
difficult
fields.
John
Kinsella's
pastorals
dread,
hardship
and graphic
beauty
are
written
a
deep
compassion.
travelling
alone together
recounts
a
trip
taken
in
t993
following
John
ESrre's
expedition
from
Adelaide,
SA
to
Albany,
WA
around
r5o years
ago.
Miriel
Lenore
had
wanted
to see
some
particular
Nullarbor
stone
formations
-
seeking
landscapes
not
land
-
and,
in-
stead,
ended
up examining
comparative
responses
to
the
contemporary
journey
taken
by
eight
older
women
and
two
bus
drivers
retracing
the
route
of the
twenty-five-year-old
explorer.
Miriel
Lenore
avoids
any
pursuit
of
imagined
au-
thEnticity
and
is knowingly
critical
in
relationto
his-
tory
and
so
doesn't
speak
as
John
Eyre.
euotations
from
Eyre's
journals
are
Iinchpins
throughout
the
book
along
withthe
complexities
of
the womens'life-
stories.
The
poems
are
direct
and
often
droll
when
en-
countering
some
of
the
lackadaisical
junkyardish
places
that
are
the
outback-
abandoned,
peeling
bits
and
pieces
contained
in
majestic
landscapes.
In,Is-
raelite
Bay'the
travellers
arrive
at
last
to
discover/
few
human
imprints/if
you
except
aweighttifiing
ma-
chine/beside
the road _
Lenore
is
also
adept
at disap-
pointment:
easy
to
miss
the
sculpture
on the plain
under
Mt
Arden:
atrainwheelfixed
on
atilted
rail
to honour
Eyre
who led
the
way
this
most
unlikely
of his
monuments
was
a
Bicentennial
proj
ect
of
the local
primary
school
where
the
Aboriginal
pupils
could
not
compete
in
races
unless
they
wore
shoes
they
did
not
own
and
at
the
same place
-'under
Mt
Arden
(i)'
the
wild
sad
cry
of
swans
brings
Eyrefiom
his
tent
their
northwardflight
promising
that
inland
sea
whose
glitter
would
be
salt
These poems
are
multi-layered
but
never
dense
or
af-
fected,
the
language
being
so intelligible
and precise.
In
just
sixty pages
Louise
Crisp
renders an
inten_
sity
which
is
sometimes
obscurely
personal
yet
al-
8/10/2019 Four Books Five Poets
3/3
ways accessible
in
terms
of
poetics.
This is a non-
linear,
womanly,
spiritual, mystical
set
of
poems
where meaning
is deliberately
restrained and elu-
sive
-
but if
I
am
fish
can
I
ev
e
r
/b
e
rainbowl
The
bush
(in
the Snowy
Mountains
)
is
mysterious. The recur-
ring symbols
are flat
oval
stones from a meandering
river, blood,
masks and
bones. Here is sensuality
-
you
suck
on my
tongue/like a
pink-red
stone
-
an d
mythical
allegory
-
I
splash inthe
shallows
going pastthe
clefi
the hoodwidens
opening
l ike renewal
the
four
men camped there
wake next morning
fe
eling
tr ansfo
r
me
d
ov
e
rnight
intofemale
Crisp is
respectful of
nature;of
ghosts,
of indigenous
people
and she
records
their
massacre
in the
re -
gion.
She
has
aflairfor
devising
moments of
height-
ened
poetics
that
produce
an
originalityvia
extreme
simplicity:
the
weather
glides
ou t
of
my
bones
growing
shorter & shorter
the
sunfolds
me
up
for
winter
nothought
no memory
Pam Brown
is
overland's
poetry
editor.