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Poetry

It is fitting that ‘Waking’, a poem that links waking with birth, opens this inspired début collection from Emma Jones: ‘There was one morning // when my mother woke and felt a twitch / inside, like the shifting of curtains. // She woke and so did I.’ So the narrator-poet announces her arrival. The birthing theme continues in the next poem, ‘Farming’, in which pearls are ‘shucked from the heart of their grey mothers’. The same poem also foregrounds the poet’s interest in Ballard-like submerged worlds – oyster farms and shipwrecks, but also entire cities – and in the polarities of sky and sea. Indeed, this collection as a whole engages imaginatively with many dualisms: worldly/other worldly, internal/external, being/not being, self/other. Jones’s method is one of controlled playfulness, and despite many allusions to biblical themes and imagery, she avoids the didactic dualism of good/evil.

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Along with regular features, this bumper edition of the Poets’ Union journal, Five Bells, includes the proceedings of festival discussions in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth: sixteen strongly argued, well-crafted papers by some of Australia’s best poets, variously considering the state of Australian poetry now. For all the individual interest of these papers, this collection’s strength lies in the way they set up parallels and contradictions, working together like a long, amiable argument.

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Since her début in 1971, Pam Brown has been a consistently intelligent and engaging presence in Australian poetry, if too often under-represented in those reputation-establishers, the anthologies. One pragmatic reason for this may lie in a further element of consistency, the formal structure of her poems. Poems that spin their way down the page, resolutely short-lined, or ones that fragment lines and thought into zigzag patterns across the breadth of the page, are faithful to the characteristics of the New Australian Poetry celebrated in John Tranter’s 1979 anthology of that title. They are characteristics that Brown has honed finely over the years. They are also, from the point of view of anthologists and, more powerfully, their publishers, wilfully heedless of that most brutal constraint, the number of pages available for any given anthology.

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Blow Out by Rae Desmond Jones

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June 2009, no. 312

Blow Out is Rae Desmond Jones’s first collection of poetry, punctuated by novels and plays, since The Palace of Art (1981). His prominence during the 1970s is evinced by his publishing four books of poetry within eight years and by his inclusion in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979). This is a long silence, but Jones, now in his late sixties, has filled it with political activism, serving as mayor of Sydney’s Ashfield Council from 2004 to 2006. So much for unacknowledged legislators.

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Alberto Dominguez identified himself as un Australiano de habla hispana – a Spanish-speaking Australian. As such, he gave enormously to the Spanish-speaking community of Sydney. Dominguez was a radio broadcaster with SBS and community radio stations in western Sydney, and a founding member of several Latin American cultural organisations. For many Spanish-speaking Australians who came as refugees from Latin America, Dominguez’s radio-voice provided them with essential information and helped them settle in. Yet when he died as a passenger aboard American Airlines flight 11, which struck the northern tower of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, most media in Australia identified him only as an Uruguayan-born migrant, a father of four and a Qantas baggage-handler. There was little mention of his work in radio, or his prominence amongst the Spanish-speaking community. Bel Vidal, whose essay opens this anthology of stories, essays and poems, asks that Australians remember Dominguez – the first Australian to die in the World Trade Centre attacks – as more than a migrant who, decades after his arrival, still lacked fluency in English. Vidal, herself a migrant from Bolivia, argues that the civic contributions made by Dominguez in his first language deserve a place in Australian history and culture.

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The Complete Poems of T.H. Jones edited by Don Dale-Jones and P. Bernard Jones

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May 2009, no. 311

In 1950 a friend presented the young Welsh poet T.H. Jones with a hand-made, leather-bound octavo notebook, the ‘Black Book’ into which he subsequently copied every completed poem he wished to preserve until shortly before his untimely death in 1965 at the age of forty-three. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) included a brief selection of unpublished poems from this notebook, as well as the poems from Jones’s four published volumes. Now, some thirty years later, we have a collection of all the poems from the notebook, as well as those from earlier preserved manuscripts, some only recently located. It also includes a handful of poems completed between the filling of the Black Book in 1964 and the poet’s death, and some additional poems that the poet considered ‘too “occasional” for preservation’, thus making it the first complete gathering of his large and impressive poetic oeuvre. The editors include a biographical introduction and extensive notes dating the poems, identifying first publications, and explaining literary and personal references.

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When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic shock troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle) and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘La Bataille D’Hernani’.

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a raiders guide by Michael Farrell

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April 2009, no. 310

Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide has no page numbers and no index, indicating that it is to be read as one. Farrell’s work, like that of the Language poets, draws attention to language itself rather than emphasising content or emotion: that is, language is at least temporarily estranged from meaning. Yet, like most attempted definitions, the same could be said of most poetry. Farrell’s work follows in a line from Mallarmé, some Futurist and Dadaist poets, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and more recent Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman. While another Melbourne ‘experimental’ poet, ΠO, often emphasises through vocal performance the component parts of words, Farrell illustrates this visually, often using some self-imposed constraint that calls for repeating lines and words that, in turn, break up until poems almost bubble into a centrifugal chaos. As in the language of text messaging, abbreviated words are nevertheless usually clear.

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‘Urgent things to say’ in the Calibre Prize

The competition was keen, the field unprecedentedly large (almost 200 entries), but after main readings and much discussion Kevin Brophy’s and Jane Goodall’s essays struck the judges of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay (Gay Bilson, Peter Rose and Rebecca Starford) as being in a class of their own. It was impossible to split them. Both writers share the third Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, and each will receive $5000.

That’s all they have in common, though. It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar essays, a measure of Calibre’s versatility and the diversity of the writers who are drawn to it. Jane Goodall’s theme, like her succinct title (‘Footprints’), has a kind of suaveness and urgency as she explores ideas about ecology and personal responsibility with reference to Kate Grenville, Mrs Aeneas Gunn, Nevil Shute and a sublime short story by Leo Tolstoy.

Kevin Brophy’s fruity title (‘“What’re yer lookin’ at yer fuckin’ dog?”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’) introduces an amazing tale of domestic mayhem and incivility in present-day inner Melbourne. Kevin Brophy’s tormentors may have been the neighbours from hell, but what a tale it is. To make sense of this five-year drama, Kevin Brophy draws on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his theory that violence – ubiquitous violence, as he sees it – is the very basis of late capitalist ‘post-political’ life.

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Freefall
must be like this,

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