Details and disorientation

In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is powerful. The reader is obliged to work hard to navigate the narrative, and I have rarely read poetry where the search for meaning has been felt so deeply. As Sartre indicates in Being and Nothingness, existential freedom of choice defines the individual. Poems, too, emerge from poet’s choices – here, an interest in avant-garde art, movies, music, literature, aesthetics, and the politics of language (including a taste for arcane or little-used words). There is a respect for locality, the tapestry of places visited (or assumed significant), and perhaps most pressingly an awareness of the fragility of world systems: climate change, diminishing global resources, inequality. The reader is placed in an unsettled deciphering mode. Social constructivism also feels important, especially the shape of belonging to one’s time through fragmentary prismatic examination of culture and social history. The poems move fluidly in the mind; virtuosity is not the central visionary concern, but the poetry dazzles visually. Plurality of being and perspective is celebrated and mourned. Many poems allude to underground musicians and bands with polysemous titles such as ‘Running with the Pack’ (after the third studio album of English group Bad Company), ‘Underground Comedown’ (a nod to Brown Acid’s sixth lysergic album), ‘Sea Priestess’ (a song by Coil, itself a testament to the endurance of the sea, with lyrics referencing crumbling murals from an abbey in Sicily – in Hawke’s hands a Petrarchan rhymed sonnet dedicated to the musician Jhonn Balance), and ‘1979’ by The Smashing Pumpkins, a beautiful poem of cascading disappointment, ‘Now the true facts of his life sound like a lie / spiralling from a slender fluke of time.’ In these hallucinatory poems, we are invited to honour disorientation as a linguistic process and encouraged to build singular insights from fragments, each poem emerging as a unique consciousness. Each poem can be read as deconstructing a theme: environmental degradation (‘Boronia Sunset’), urban adolescence (‘Running with the Pack’), illness (‘Zero Degrees’), or de-idealised countercultural aspirations (‘Upper Gully’), but this approach to critique is a difficult perspective to hold ‘steady’; sometimes I hear the author remonstrating, ‘I didn’t mean that, at all.’ Interestingly, the poems can be experienced as music or textural surfaces while also read for intelligence of purpose and resistant consciousness. The prose poem/essay that centres the book, ‘The Wedding’, is well placed. Other reviewers rightly have alluded to its Proustian satirical flair, and in this sense the ‘soursobs’ moment is hard to overlook, but I also found echoes of a Montaigne-style poetic: a prose essay which employs a second-person observant digressive voice to satirical yet idiosyncratic effect. This work extends to just over seven dense pages of text and draws in social satire and cultural comment with perceptive humour, but also questions poetry’s lineage within its marriage of language and experience: Most of us, however, strugglein our hesitation between choices of sound and sense, challengedby words which never capture our intentions – which charm theear but miss the point, in phrasing worn smooth by overuse,shuffling cabbalistically through selections and combinations for alanguage which might justify thought – and always settle for anunsatisfactory evocation, suggesting a world that does not exist: adry scattering of wind through the leaves of a tree which cannot belocated in any forest. The poems in Whirlwind Duststorm digress, fold back and out upon themselves without reaching an easy conclusion (the leaves of that unlocatable tree approached briefly and lost again). There is a not-so-gentle jab at Australian colonialism in ‘The Demolition of Hotel Australia’, with its acerbic commentary: ‘black turtlenecked women matched with a Penguin Classic / detecting tropisms in the Euclidean archiforms / of Bauhaus after the youth concert’. As the poet reminds us, ‘this is not memory / but an unforgetting’. Such skewering details are a delight not only because a period of history is so accurately observed in all its affectations and pathos, but also the demolition of the hotel is metaphorically a continual cultural process. I found a sudden lyric clarity in the final elegies of the collection, ‘September’ and ‘Dormition’ – not a relief exactly but a familiarity of footing. This familiarity of imagery punches throughout the collection. For example, I still recall images from the poems long after reading them: ‘a young mother / with three clenched children, all without jumpers’ (‘South East’). These jolts of recognition briefly surface and are swept away but do not disappear. In the homage to William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’, which likely references multiple Emilys, the beauty of the natural world is celebrated, but there is also fragility as in Faulkner’s short story, which cautions that we don’t see the world clearly when too idealistic. The first poem in the collection, ‘Axis’, tonally introduces the mechanics of movement around a fulcrum, a core that centres the trajectory of ideas. The titular poem, ‘Whirlwind Duststorm’, the most politically transparent in the book, addresses the fractures of late capitalism and is full of savage asides, such as this comment on the nature of counselling, which made me laugh aloud: ‘She’d had some private meetings with her workplace / psychologist, just a sprinkling of aspersions, like / tripping an outside light with everything exposed / in their night garden.’ Sweet Movie, the 1974 surrealist comic-drama of the Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, which was vigorously banned on release, features toward the end of the book in an elegiac poem that perhaps references the recent passing of the director in 2019: Homesickness is our only guide when no passagefor return is viable or necessary: briefly windowed in the silver gleam of a gelato cup, or the apricotglow of summer light slanting through shutters In speaking of a ‘serial Europe disembowelled by war’, this poem’s sombre mood of tragedy and disillusionment lingers and can’t be assuaged wholly by homage to art. How does poetry speak to the present? What are its necessary forms? In a recent review in The New York Review of Books (‘Poems from the Storm’, 28 May 2020), Elisa Gabbert muses (with a nod towards oversimplification) that ‘contemporary poetry’s only subject is climate change’ and that ‘whiteness and privilege are always in the background like weather and rising sea levels’. Whirlwind Duststorm offers a poetic of kaleidoscopic intellectual reach. The way Hawke plays with an ‘accelerated temporality’ together with ‘bursts of revelatory awareness’ and an acceptance of ‘unsatisfactory evocation’ raises his collection into a triumph. One is left with a sense of empathy for human frailty, a language which might justify thought.

Jennifer Harrison

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‘Rinbo Abdo’, a new poem by Philip Mead

We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain

Critic of the Month with Ian Dickson

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

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