Volume 25, number 2, October 1998
individual and communal. Unlike
him, she does not have a dialect
that stands strongly against the
usual domestic (as opposed to
public) code of the oppressor.
voice tends to be—by common sense
and cliche. There are still too many
tired metaphorical expressions and
too much opinion. The alcohol
level is not always high enough, for
us to laugh and fall down dead of
the truth.
Her solution is to pare back. As her
style matures it becomes simpler,
more anecdotal, less ambitious. She
wants the facts, not the words, to
speak. She wants to record her
unadorned voice. Perhaps this leads
too many individual pieces to sound
chatty, or like the quick jottings of
journal entries. Though even
these—collectively—give a faceted
portrait.
Rebecca Edwards
DON'T PLAY GAMES,
I WANT TO BE WOKEN UP
As we read through chronologically
we see her accept the shrinking of
her range. Affection, never untroubled by loss or betrayal, produced
some of the most moving and
complex of her earlier poems. But
now, she has given up on romantic
passion. One of the new poems
makes ironic comment on, "The
perfect relationship." It reveals an
attitude that finds as much comfort
in lack of contact and lack of
expectation, and meditates on the
prolongation of a chaste kiss
brought about by the lingering taste
of curry.
Mal Morgan, Out of the Fast Lane, Five
Islands Press, 1998
R.A. Simpson, The Impossible and
Other Poems, Five Islands Press, 1998
Deb Westbury, Surface Tension, Five
Islands Press, 1998
Jordie Albiston, The Hanging
of Jean
Lee, Black Pepper, 1998
Ouyang Yu, Songs
of
the Last Chinese
Poet, Wild Peony, 1997
Many poems in Out of the Fast Lane
are addressed to Morgan's friends
and acquaintances, most of them
famous in the literary world. This sort
of name-dropping can be dreary, and
the easy, intimate tone becomes an
excuse for slackness in poems such as
"Homonculus": "safeway/ is not a
poem/ the op-shop/ is not a poem,/
too commercial."
At their best, the new poems convey
clear, easily accessible clusters of
images. Sometimes these have the
playful vividness of haiku, though
with rather more metaphor and
explanation. Where the poems fail
is where the voice of the poet is
contaminated—as one's everyday
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IiNJC Reviews
There are some stunning images:
"Vincent/ painted a sky/ wilder than
the sea/ and stars/ that cut you up."
(Pale Sea of Blue Glass). There are
also some that are too soupy for my
taste. "1 Come to Your Body," is an
overspiced love poem in which
Morgan's perception of a woman's
enjoyment of sex seems fairly
unenlightened: "1 come to your body
like a white page,/ full of me."
The title declares its intent: Italian
cheese, yin rouge, a medium steak,
and, to add piquancy, an antipasto
of "hearts that can be/ mashed/ like
dark red! plums" (A Woman Paints
My Portrait). I wouldn't mind less
roses, more mash.
R. A. Simpson's The Impossible and
Other Poems has a couple of very fine
poems (Paranoia, With Medea's
Fury), and many great ideas which
aren't quite realised into great
poetry. All too often, prose rhythms
are clipped into frustratingly dull
lines: "Thinking of squeezing a
violin/ into a little glass of water/ is
simply/ seeing the impossible" (The
Impossible). There's something
lacking, everything is too safe, and
Simpson seems reluctant to step
away from poetic conventionparticularly in his opening lines: "I
recall a night" (Portrait on Water), "I
found a torn photo" (School Photo:
1941), "Idle on the Bridge" (Familiars).
Even "The dog is dreaming bones"
(Backyard) is not, on a second
reading, a very surprising or engaging opening.
IiNJc
Like Morgan, Simpson knows how to
make a poem sound like poetry. More
than craftmanship though, what I
expect, what I need, from a poet in
his late sixties, is depth of experience,
a richness of perception, propelled by
the willingness to take risks. In "The
House of Judgement," Simpson
begins to delve into the big unanswerables—is there a saviour? is
anyone judging humanity? why is
god felt only as an absence?—but he
shies away too soon. "Drawing from
Shadows" opens a dark, ambiguous
space: "Nothing before/ and nothing
after/ these four study walls," but it's
not until "A Cardinal Talks to
Caravaggio" that Simpson finally
reveals what he is capable of. This
tight masterpiece prickles with icy
lust, and the greed of its last lines is
breathtaking.
The Hanging of Jean Lee, by Jordie
Albiston, is a re-creation of certain
pivotal incidents in the life of the
last woman to be hanged in
Australia. Lee's voice develops, in the
rhythms of 40s swing, from an
earnest four year-old, to soldier's
good-time girl, to hardened prostitute
capable of murder. The steady,
journalistic inevitability is broken,
powerfully, by Lee's cry to the God
who has forsaken her: "I will teach
Him the scriptures from inside of me"
(Dear Diary 1934).
There is nothing moralistic about
Albiston's unfurling of Lee's character. Why, and how, she became
hardened enough to stub out
cigarettes in an old man's chest, is
Volume 25, number 2, October 1998
hinted at, rather than imaginatively
"explained." This left me unsatisfied
on the first reading. I wanted
Albiston to dive in, away from "the
facts," to make a solid if fictional
connection between an early and a
later event. When I went back to the
book a second time, however, I
found that it simply flowed, that
everything was right; the slightly
jangly rhythms, the shifts between
newspaper reportage and Lee's
voice, the juxtaposition of "past"
(Lee's childhood and youth) and
"now" (her imprisonment and
execution). The seamless narrative
opens to explore, with great
subtlety, Lee's development as both
recipient and perpetrator of
atrocities in a place and time which
failed to "handle her with care" (see
"School Report [ 192 81").
still an original, powerful vision of a
woman wrestling with ancient
trauma inside the living cave, "the
whale of [her]self."
I am grateful for Albiston's restraint,
for the delicate sense of timing with
which she places a poem like "In
Defence of the Working Girl" very
soon after "Dear Diary (1941)." This
is a book that will "make its mark,"
in a more positive sense than its
subject.
I mistrust writers who doubt both
their poems' efficacy and their
readers' intelligence by adding
footnotes. They detract from excellent poems, (death in thirroul/ the
cleaner's story), whilst adding
nothing to mediocre ones (meditation with cloud and waterbird). In
"death in thirroul," the context
makes it very clear that "harpo" is
Brett Whiteley; sticking a footnote
right under the last line just hurts
the eyes;
"Door," with its contrast between
archetype (the body silhouetted
against an open doorway) and
modern physics "my body... no
more/ than water and stardust/ held/
in a pattern of light" is far more
satisfying than a merely pretty
poem, like "Winter Fruit." There's
some ugly prose chopped up into
short lines (especially "Confucius at
the Rock Sung Restaurant") and a
few serious mistakes that don't
belong in a first, let alone a third,
collection. In "Homing," for example, the flesh on a dead pelican
confusingly appears/disappears in
the same image.
By comparison, Deb Westbury's
Surface Tension is somewhat patchy.
There are some excellent poems: the
pain and beauty of "Wrapt," the
sense of impending grief in "The
Night Before": "It was a mistake/ to
go down to the sea/ where every
abandoned castle/ is my lonely
breast." "Whalespotting" sounded
better when I heard it on Radio
National a few years ago, but it is
There are too many lines, in too
many poems—including the opening
Beach Suite—which are not strung
taut enough; meaning wobbles and
dives into the sand before striking a
true note. More tension, please.
LiFsJc
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IiNJc Reviews
Ouyang Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese
Poet, is crude, vicious, overtly political, and downright nasty about
Australia: "people are so quiet and
content/ they live and love in a sleep
kind of way! ... children are
enormous animals that never grow
up!... nothing happens" (No. 5). The
Poet (and in this distinctly postmodern text he is/is not Ouyang Yu)
hates China "let's compose this last
song of our twilight civilization/ on
the stinking feet just unbound" (No.
78), and hates his new country even
harder. The book is an angry
struggle to tear down structures in
an alien language; it stinks with
sexual/intellectual/spiritual
frustration, but it is also desperately
beautiful:
the spring is on display from the
flowers of dark trees
and the birds even sing in the gas
fireplace
this poet now is contemplating his
next round of bullets
one at a time at himself
while singing his last song of a
spring
that has no spring in it
(No. 72)
a sense of conversation with the
Word itself (No. 47), he makes "good
on them" into a withering curse (No.
50), he takes our/his best epithet and
does this: "in the next century or so/
let's kill all the editors/and publish
from headtop/ now you want
minimalism/ you dickhead/ that's
what you can minimalize yourself
into" (No. 84).
There is only one blindspot—a big
one—the concept of Aboriginal
civilization (in a spiritual, if not
material sense) is simply not addressed: "you can't get a mayan an
egyptian a greek a roman an indian
a chinese civilization from the middle
of australia/ nor anywhere on the
coast" (No. 8). Perhaps this is the
only appropriate response for a
"resident alien," but if you're going
to dig into that particular wound
these days you need to find something more than terra nullius.
Any book as important as this will
have its fldws. By its very nature it
renders the poet extremely vulnerable. Ouyang Yu is willing to enter
the dangerous spaces, where poetry
becomes a source of real power,
rather than just another game. It
might even wake us up.
Some parts of the sequence are
outrageously funny, others scathing:
"these poets live/ less like the snow
than the frost/ that thinly covers the
morning grass!... leaving the
transient chill in the bone" (No. 54).
With sustained and savage brilliance Ouyang Yu takes Australian
idiom and forces it to explode
complacency wide open. He combines an Aussie name like "lex" with
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