Tuesday Poem - 'Dancing time and space' by Jenny Blackford

Dancing time and space

I

Men are not forbidden here,

but seldom risk this hall

packed full with women of a certain age.

– Mindful attention to the knees.

Poor Emma Bovary was just a needy child,

sad Anna K not thirty

when they died so painfully.

– Eyes softly focussed.

It's safe to say that most us

are twice their age or more, well past

hope or fear of tragic passion.

– Mindful attention to the hips.

We do our best to undulate our stiffened bones

like yogic cats, like swaying trees,

like steadfast Sanskrit-speaking warriors.

– Soft face, easy breath.

We are an antique navy of creaking ships

afloat on the parquet floor

in boat pose, the navasana.

– Mindful attention to the back.

We pull our navels gently to our spines,

breathe in, breathe out,

breathe in.

– Slow breath, steady mind.

We breathe.

II

Standing, we are Shiva, dancing time

and space into being, perhaps a little wobbly

over rusty ankles on our rainbow mats.

Still, poised with one knee just-bent,

braced, strong, the other hip swung open

like the gate to a new multiverse,

its thigh and foot high-tilted, balanced

by ballerina hands held sideways-lifted

in a frozen moment from creation's dance,

we touch the electricity

of space and time.

I was well pleased to have the chance to catch up with Jenny Blackford here in Melbourne when this tip top poem was highly commended in the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize. Jenny and her husband Russell live in Newcastle, with their well-beloved cat, and they happened to have planned a trip to Melbourne, and then Jenny heard her poem was short listed, and the dates co-incided. Fate. Or something very like that. We had a calming drink at Young & Jackson's and then headed on up to Collected Works for the shindig. And how well Jenny read the poem when her turn came. I was very taken with it. I am picking that it will be a foundation poem for Jenny's next book. Her first book, The Duties of a Cat (Pitt Street Poetry) is still available I think.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/jenny-blackford/

Tuesday Poem - 'A walk on the moor' by Harvey Molloy

A walk on the moor

The steep ascent

tugs my calf muscles

my camera eyes

survey the moorscape

as I approach

the soft arc of the ridge

I pitch then yaw

arms extended

to avoid a small pool

in the bracken

the wind bites against

the thermal insulation

of my Parka suit

but telemetry tells ground control

we are still go

& confirms a green light

somewhere beneath the peat

the graves of the children

Brady & Hindley murdered —

what were their names?

& why did she name her dog Puppet?

& what happened to Puppet

after she was sentenced to life?

I moonwalk hop

bounce from left foot to right

pretending to be light

to be free of the earth

my gloved hands collect

samples of heather

for detailed analysis later

in the bedroom laboratory

should I make it home.

I am trying to be sanguine and upbeat about the loss of the Tuesday Poem community – kicked off about 5 years ago by Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon. Things fall apart. But I am not ready to fall apart yet. I like having point and purpose to my reading. So I shall carry on until the wobble in my orbit becomes too plangent. And it is very fitting that my first pick for the new regime is Harvey Molloy, who was a valued member of that community. I bumped into Harvey at the poetry conference in Wellington, and we did the book swap thing, the thing that poets do. So I got to read Moonshot (Steele Roberts 2008) and I can see quite clearly why Mary McCallum has selected him for next year's 3 poet Hoopla series at Mākaro Press. The man has skillz. I particularly took to this poem, because it summons up such an ominous sense of place, as it celebrates the natural elevation of childhood.

Tuesday Poem - Two Short Poems by Janis Freegard

The sound of dropped silverware is, like, really loud.

I think I'll do that gamelan course

next semester. When there's no crowd,

the sound of dropped silverware is, like, really loud.

I've uploaded all my tunes to the cloud.

Did I tell you my parents are getting divorced?

The sound of dropped silverware is, like, really loud.

I think I'll do that gamelan course.

La Fée Verte

I drank all the absinthe

my mind is now a milky jade

I must inform you that I've driven

to the outskirts of Paris

to discuss An Ideal Husband

with Estonian lapdancers

later I intend to watch Catherine Millet

taking in the pleasure of the crowd

I've gone where you'll never find me:

beyond louche

Well, The Glass Rooster (Auckland University Press) is quite a book, and Janis Freegard is quite a poet. What a pleasure to pay attention to this book and this poet. Janis and I met up again at the NZ Poetry Conference recently and did a book swap as we said our goodbyes. So often this is how one comes upon the best books. The best books are revenue neutral LOL.

Re the poems, the first quirky deliciousness is the banner poem for the Cityscape section. And for those of you who don't know, La Fée Verte, the title of the second, means the green fairy, and is the old time nickname for absinthe. And louche is a French word mean cross-eyed or squinting. There is a ceremony involved with watering down your absinthe, called La Louche. Apparently it involves a lot more than, as I thought, watching the colour cloud.

http://www.absinthefever.com/absinthe/ritual

And louche is a word I often use to describe people I know and like. It means - disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way. It does seem as if I know a lot of louche people. But me, I don't like absinthe much. I do like the mystique it has gathered around it.

Oh, and yes, I had to google Catherine Millet – not that it mattered in my apprehension of the poem. And yes, I had heard of her. Quite a louche person, IMHO.

http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2015/the-glass-rooster.html

Tuesday Poem - 'Ada - Dies Natalis' by Geoffrey Lehmann

Ada – Dies Natalis

I

“As rare as rockinghorse shit” -

one in 15,000 the internet says.

Standing in the corridor

of the children's cardiac unit

I'm surrounded by coloured diagrams,

the blue veins and red arteries

of wrong connections.

Each map is wild and unique

as a snowflake,

but they're all actuarial possibilities,

and each is a life.

Ada's is the supracardiac version.

The veins from her lungs join

in a single vein that seeks

and almost touches her left ventricle,

and loses its way and veers

in an improbable backwards loop

to her right ventricle.

Ada is simple to fix

if five hours under surgical lights are simple.

II

“Isn't she beautiful! Isn't she beautiful!”

the young aunt, ardent, repeats.

Feeding from aureoles like brown dinner plates,

Ada (pronounced 'Ardour”

after Nabokov's heroine)

breathes heavily, gulps air,

turns blue as she starts to cry.

III

Tomorrow the veins from her lungs

will be cut

and joined to her left ventricle.

The grandmothers wash and scrub the house,

a grandfather (that's me) standing on a stool,

instructed by the grandmothers,

ties a clothesline to an iron spike

set in nineteenth century brickwork.

Eight days from now Ada

will be carried through a narrow dim house.

Her eyes will open like dark butterflies

and lungs inhale

this nectarine tree, ripening muscatels

and staked tomatoes in the summer heat.

IV

On any day 300,000 are born

of dust from exploded supernovae.

There was no witness when a point

became the universe

and the first stars started to burn,

billions of galaxies lighting up.

The 300,000 all have witnesses,

the nurse who spotted Ada's laboured breathing -

“There's something wrong with that baby.”

V

“Hibiscus” - one of her first words.

It's night and the passerby

can look over a gate past pink and red roses through a clear glass door

and see a shadowy figure in a hallway

gyrating and shaking a maraca and tambourine

to inaudible music,

who's wondering if neighbours think he's mad,

but he has a daughter to entertain -

she's hidden in a cot -

Ada, two years and a bit.

VI

In the dark of early morning

I hear a muffled voice talking to a child,

and a solitary cry.

The child's translation:

“Daddy's wings have gone and he's lost his fairy dust.”

VII

Her father has been dead for three weeks.

She's restless in the restaurant.

Hoisting her on my hip

we go out in the street -

as my veal parmigiana arrives.

I identify flowers in gardens lit by street lamps.

'That's a strelitzia,” I say,

“a relative of the banana.”

We head towards an illuminated shop front,

with cut flowers in buckets on the footpath

and shadows standing in doorways.

“I saw Daddy,” she says.

At the house where's she's staying, she chooses

Sonia and the Flying Babies.

“Read it again.”

I do, but Sonia has a father.

In a private voice, as I'm leaving, she says:

“I want you to stay.”

VIII

A month later, at two years and nine months

she's still finding questions and answers:

“How did your Daddy die?”

“He was quite old and had a heart attack,” I reply.

“He was in a room by himself

and ran out into the street and died.”

IX

Ada has become herself,

the miniature parts,

all in working order, are complete.

Aged three she mounts a platform

to wash her hands,

looks down and sighs -

the cares of adulthood.

The rectangular box-basin

of sparkling white porcelain

(an aesthetic manifesto of her architect-mother)

has a reddish-brown smear of water,

tannin-stained rivulets.

She flicks on a tap

and her small plump hand

decisively sluices out the discoloured water,

face averted, absorbed in her task.

Thanks to Geoff for allowing me to post this tender, luminous poem. And thanks also for the wonderful book which I have just now put on the pile to be shelved. Poems 1957 – 2013 contains the long sweep of a writing life. This is what he has written and wants to save. It was quite a journey. Of particular interest to me on this first reading, was Spring Forest, which I had not read in its entirety before. I'll be posting a couple of poems from that section in the new year. And as a bonus, apart from bravura and adept poetics displayed within, Poems 1957 – 2013 must be one of the handsomest books I have ever had in my hands. The cover drawing by Charles Blackman of the young Lehmann is almost edible.

Meanwhile this year, (better late than never) this high-water mark of a book is up for one of the big prizes, The Prime Minister's Literary Awards, to be announced in Sydney on 14^th December.

 

Poetry

• Devadatta's Poems by Judith Beveridge (Giramondo Publishing)
• Earth Hour by David Malouf (University of Queensland Press)
• Exhibits of the Sun by Stephen Edgar (Black Pepper Publishing)
• Poems 1957–2013 by Geoffrey Lehmann (UWA Publishing)
• Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems by Alex Skovron (Puncher & Wattmann)
  

http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/poems-1957-2013

Tuesday Poem - 'On Looking: In The Lost And Found' by Michael Harlow

ON LOOKING: IN THE LOST AND FOUND

On this mouse-coloured street where

everyone is trying to look like each

other, they are looking to undress the

world with such a fine cosmological

eye, you might think they are trying

to see into the heart of a star itself.

Whole families out in their glads snapping

pictures of each other’s mums and dads,

and you and me. They have such a gaze

for all of it. That seeking dream: looking

for a black cat in a dark room. But if you’ve

come this far and end up in the lost and

found, you know that old story, where no

one becomes someone one day; you pray

for one thing and you get another. You know

that looking for a black cat in a dark room

where there is none – you find one anyway.

I bumped into Michael Harlow at the poetry conference and Litcrawl recently in Wellington. I first bumped into him in Christchurch in 1980! He is in fine fettle – just scored the Kathleen Grattan and the Lauris Edmond! So good to chew the fat again, and when I got home to Australia I returned to his book, The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap. After my first reading of it I had asked Michael if I might post a poem – but Michael is sometimes not so great at answering emails. I thought maybe he had changed his email address. People often do. But no, it was just one of those things. So, as I say, when I got back to Oz I pulled the book off the shelf and gave it another read. Because I had forgotten which poem I had asked for the first time, and supposed, as I read, my first pick would jump out at me. But do you know, it didn’t. The book had shifted on me. It was quite a perilous and slippery feeling, to think you have read something, and, as you read it again, to find out you have not. I was quite at a loss.

I don’t know where this poem is set, but it irresistibly reminds me of Lecce in Puglia, of going out in the evening into the full flood of the passegiata.

I very much like the astute line endings, the precision of the punctuation, the vernacular ‘glads’ (for glad rags, and also of course for so much else).

And I also like the winding helix of a line – ‘where no / one becomes someone one day;’.

I think the whole poem swings on that line. It is really using the curse/blessing blessing/curse of the archetypical fairy tale.

And I just adore the way the poem opens with a mouse-coloured street (a rough translation of a vernacular term I opined to myself) and looms up to the big finish with the black cat. (I had to go back and rejig my initial apprehension.) So what exactly was going on? Never mind, I loved it.

 http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2009/The-Tram-Conductors-Blue-Cap.html

Tuesday Poem - 'New undergraduates tour the psychology clinic' by Melinda Smith

New undergraduates tour

the psychology clinic

This is the room where the troubled come to be untroubled

This is the room for the opening of mouths in pain

This is the room for picking lightly at the scab on the deep wound

This is the room of dignified gibbering

This is the room of the short fuse

This is the room for the vomiting of memory;

for the smearing of consequences, the flinging of blame

This is the room which was once in darkness, with a velvet curtain

                                                                    and a wooden grille

This is the room of stripping

of disembowelling

of the scooping out and spreading of glistening innards

This is the room of fear of silence

This is the room of too much truth, and not enough

This is the room of fear, of silence

This is the room of the rushing and botching of reconstructive

                                                                                      surgery

This is the room for the impersonation of friendship

and the purchase of listening

This is the room of the drinking of too much water

and of jiggling in the low chair and of the dogged crossing of legs

This is the room for the rewriting of diaries

This is the room of the long clenching

This is the room of rocking without sound

This is the room for the binding of deep wounds with gauze

                                                                                    bandages

This is the room for the closing of mouths in pain

This is the room where the unhealable come to be unhealed

I was well contented to have the chance to be at Melinda Smith's La Mama gig in Melbourne recently, and because of Ken Smeaton's excellent filming of poets' project, it exists out on youtube if you care to partake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtYzXrwmRqc&feature=share

Melinda's book Drag Down To Unlock Or Place An Emergency Call (Pitt Street Poetry) is one of those books that you really want to read, and then read again. A true cut and come again book. And the judges of the Prime Minister's Award agree with me because it won last year's prize. (And it is a prize that is worth winning.) Melinda is a poet to watch, and I am already on the qui vive for the next book. What a wonderful poet she is, and a tip top reader, and a hell of a good person to kick around town with.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/melinda-smith/

Tuesday Poem - 'Front Verandah' by Sophie Tarrant

FRONT VERANDAH

He starts the day by lighting incense in the neck

of her vase. She breathes in a gust of wind until the scent fills her.

His hands, which she has seen break tree branches as thick as his arm,

tappity-patter the bongo drums. The rhythm pulses through her chest

of drawers. She sings along

with wooden wind chime voice, out of time but melodic.

He eats lunch at the table, his leg touching hers.

He pays no attention to the view through her windows

even when she swings and whines with rusty hinges.

He reads a magazine with ads for shampoo, models with dyed

blonde hair. Part of her palm tree comes through the window,

a few fingers brush the open page.

The fringe of her frond is yellow from sunlight.

He leaves her, walks away down the street

comes back with a sprig of frangipani, pink as a blush.

He tucks the stem into her thick fronds

layered across the windowsill. She feels warm inside,

shades him with her maroon veil.

He lies down to rest on her white cushioned forehead.

When the kookaburras laugh on the power line outside,

her ferns rustle, shhhhhh, and the birds fly away.

His snores vibrate through her chest

as vibrantly as bongo beats.

I met Sophie Tarrant up in Brisbane at the Riverbend reading (she runs a reading called Below Deck which I must get to next time I am up that way.) And then she was in Melbourne just as I was putting on a Big Read at Collected Works for NZ Poetry Day, so I invited her along and after dithering over Janet Frame and Chris Price she chose to read Glen Colquhoun, and was a total asset. Later that night she gave me her chapbook Memories of Home and I liked it a lot and chose the verandah poem because of its evocation of Brisbane (such a spirit of place!) and the charm of the personification of the verandah.

Hear her read her poem.

http://www.sophietarrant.com/poems/2015/3/30/front-verandah-poem-by-sophie-tarrant

http://www.sophietarrant.com/

https://www.facebook.com/belowdeckpoetry 



 

Tuesday Poem - 'Frankston Train' by Garth Madsen

Frankston Train

Armpit to armpit, everyone sweats in a different

language here. A woman's voice calls out the

name of each station as we arrive, another

scratching in the race of life, she says Mordialloc

as if there can be less dialloc. Four urban

minimalists play euchre, I cannot see if their

cards are real or not. The echo girl sits under the

'no feet on seats' sign, her foot on the seat, the

angle showing the curve of her in-step better than

high heels, she tells her mobile phone that she

was named after a car number plate. The

powdered aeroplane blonde with an imitation

pearl necklace becomes a delta, people pushing

past her on either side. A drunk shouts, “Of

course, I'm smart. I went to school, didn't I?'

A father, a mother scold their son as if they are

trying to make him smile for the camera. The

lowrider with an earring drops a water bottle at a

ninja bitch's feet, there is an empty McDonalds

wrapper under her seat and a browning apple

core. The rainmaker with crickets in his ears

drums the seat between his legs. The bonsai

brunette sheds her black cardigan and flicks her

anklet at the far border of my vision and I ask

myself where her story ends and mine begins.

One of my favourite Melbourne poets is Garth Madsen, and he lives out on my train line – the Frankston line. He is very tender and astute about the place where we both live. His 'Frankston For Beginners' is a must-read, as far as I am concerned. I have no idea how you might acquire a copy though. He had a big launch for the book, out at Seaford, (with enough food, including a chocolate fountain, for an invading army whose quartermaster had gone awol so the troops are pretty hungry, about as hungry as hungry troops can get) and then there was a reading at Red Wheelbarrow in Brunswick, and then as far as I know that was the end of it. Anyhow anyhow, when Avril Bradley decided to do an anthology of poems about Frankston, Garth was a must. Those who know Garth truly appreciate him. We had a lovely launch for the anthology in the remoter reaches of the McClelland Sculpture Park in Langwarrin - well done Avril for pulling it all together – and this poem was a stand out for me. And a shout out to Michelle Leber whose stunning photo is on the cover of 'City Of Stars”.

PS Garth often blocks his poems so they are as neat as bricks an expert bricklayer has laid – but no matter how I fiddle I can't make my blog block – so please forgive my my hod, my grout, my towel.

Tuesday Poem - 'Waiting' by Tracy Ryan

Waiting

Waiting for bog

to blossom

with white flame

of bog cotton

is groom not given

to see the dress

before the day

Knowing her only

one long cold season

is love meeting

weekdays only

or sensing no more than

the moon's dark side

thus the moon's

wrong meaning

Yet bog in continual winter

is most bog wearing nothing

but more and more water

her deep nature

reiterated

bog is what bog does

And yet another launch at Collected Works of a wonderful book! This time Hoard by Tracy Ryan, joint winner of the Whitmore Press Prize. It's a deep, unfathomable book, and a shifty, slippery book. With who knows what within. So like a bog, so like a hoard within a bog. (Tracy's pronunciation of the local way of saying 'hoard' is still resonating with me.) And how much I appreciated the quiet, stringent perfection of the laying down of the words on the page.

Marion May Campbell's trenchant launch speech is published here in Cordite -

http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/campbell-ryan/

- and it pretty well covers anything else I might be moved to say about this book.

http://whitmorepress.com/new-releases/