States of Poetry Western Australia - Series Two
Series Two of the Western Australian States of Poetry anthology is edited by Kevin Brophy and features poems by Chris Arnold, Josephine Clarke, Lucy Dougan, John Kinsella, Edwin Lee Mulligan, and Annamaria Weldon. Read Kevin Brophy's introduction to the anthology here.
Taking on a transformation as an eagle and in that formation I was traveling within the cloud dust: and within the cloud dust there were small balls of lights. They were so small, as small as the smallest grain of sand. I myself was one of many divided as a matrix, scattered throughout and far reaches of the universe. We were all moving and weaving continually as if someone was making a dress out of stars.
And the more I knew about myself the larger an image I became. I looked over my shoulder. It was the universe. And looking back at the small ball of light that was small as the smallest grain of sand, I knew then really it was the size of our sun.
And the moral behind this story talks about the burning desire that burns within you that drives you to do the things you do! For me personally, I see mine every passing day of my life: the sun. It is also one of many scattered throughout and far reaches of the universe.
And when I sleep under the stars, as usual, I see so many of them that remind me that each individual has a burning desire that burns within them that drives them to do the things they do.
And as long as there’s a warmth that burns within it and rotates around the four corners of the earth, there’s a life that was given a purpose that comes in the form of human flesh. A gift of mortality.
Edwin Lee Mulligan
‘Sun poem’ was commissioned for the dance theatre production Cut the Sky (2015) by Marrugeku.
There’s two points of view about country, there’s a whitefella way of looking at country: seeing country as commodity, things they can take from the land and what they can make of it that can be useful. In my country there’s a lot of minerals. From diamond, gold, copper, oil, you name it. It’s all there for the taking. There is also uranium and gas. This country is very rich they say. But from an Aboriginal point of view there is another way of looking at country. The country dreams for her children.
For example gas ... the most desired mineral right now in the Kimberleys. For us she is a lady. She is part of our country’s richest mining deposit in Australian history. She’s a very rare expensive mineral that is highly toxic and a poisonous liquid substance hidden miles beneath us, within the Earth crust.
I’m going to tell you about this lady. Her English name is Valhalla, meaning the land of the dead. She is the most feared woman that ever walked the face of the earth. There were many stories that been foretold about this woman: stealing people from their sleep, possessing whole clan groups with silent death sleeps, leaving them to wake up into the spirit world, entombed in termite mounds for eternity.
They considered her to be very dangerous but to me, she’s like a mother. She’s been dreaming country. Dreams of ghost walking termite mounds in the distance through grassless plains.
She held my hand and walked me through country, speaking to the land and the land was listening. There’s a message being brushed up by the wind, her whispering words of burning grass dancing with tongues of fire.
When I stand on my spirit country, Ballil, I look down from the ridge. I see grassless plains where she once walked devouring innocent souls for her liking. We are continually warning people, even the hungry mining dog companies about a treacherous woman. She is poison.
Her name is Dungkabah (whisper)
Edwin Lee Mulligan
‘Dungkabah’ was commissioned for the dance theatre production Cut the Sky (2015) by Marrugeku.
Sleeping under a blanket, half asleep, I wrapped myself tightly, feeling the warmth after a cold night. I thought I was in a dream and wished it would be a good one. And as I spoke to myself about what this generation had to do with me, and the purpose in this life I’ve been given, all of a sudden I went into a deep dream. It happened so fast, it was like being sucked into a tunnel through a vacuum, Willy Willy, tornado and a twister.
My whole body went numb, paralysed. I couldn’t feel anything except the rhythm of my heart beating. As it beats it became louder and the louder it became the more heavily it weighed and the more heavily it weighed my spirit grew into a formation, becoming larger than a life image. My spirit transmitted, descending within the earth, and transforming into one of mother earth’s recognisable landmark monuments she created.
At that point I became gigantic and muscular, stretching for kilometres. In a way I had the earth in the palm of my hands. And looking at my hands I knew it was a symbol of great significance and high priority as an offering that was prepared for a celebration.
After that transformation to a dream I opened my eyes and what was before me left me breath-taken. I became a mountain overlooking vast flood plains. The ground was so fertile and rich having layers of minerals that were attached to my nerve systems, running with water and river. I became one with this earth. Pretty much like the blanket that I wrapped myself around that night but on a grand scale.
And then a voice I heard that spoke to me that felt encouraging to my spirit. The spirit of the land spoke to me, they said: Can you feel the connection to this land? I turned around under the gaze of my ancestors and softly replied ... exactly.
Edwin Lee Mulligan
‘Blanket Story’ was commissioned for the dance theatre production Cut the Sky (2015) by Marrugeku.
It’s been years and it’s never been raining, a sign of weather patterns at work in the creamy blue skies. An elder looked up and noticed a single cloud formation appeared. It was going towards a significant place. The cloud was very small and very dark and yet it still didn’t rain.
On this earth we walk the grassy plains with sun bleached sensitive skin sucked up by the heat, and with this temperature we too will weather away like a single insignificant blade of grass in the field.
Since the coming of time the spirits of the skies have been painting their pictures, telling the story of changing seasons.
They reached to the earth choosing individual vibrant colors to paint the universal giant canvas, calculating the mathematics of day and night, of rotating cosmos with our sun, stars and the moon, second by second in an endless equation.
An elder would say they’re singing our mothers’ land beneath our feet. We too will sing with them and yet our generation still walks on the grassy plains left alone wondering what this weather patterns means.
Edwin Lee Mulligan
‘Jimidilung’ was commissioned for the dance theatre production Cut the Sky (2015) by Marrugeku.
Once upon a time the crocodile was a human being. And then one day, one particular day his heart became hard and when his heart became harder, his flesh became hard and when his flesh became harder his skin became hard, and when his skin became harder it transformed into the scales on his back, deeply cut wounds that have never been healed.
He developed a taste for blood, he ripped open his stomach in a sacrifice. His own blood became cries of pain, floating debris of the past drifting on murky waters. He built towns and cities as a bandage to cover his wounds, leaving only a bloodstain to reveal his past. And then the crocodile says, ‘All Kingdoms are built by blood’.
The crocodile is a great hunter, a hunter of souls. Having the characteristics of a human being he is no different from a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And in the nature of the wolf he too walks on all fours.
Beware of murky waters and beware what lies below. There is a cunning creature that needs more than water to drink and more than a bandage to cover his scaly skin.
Edwin Lee Mulligan
‘Crocodile’ was commissioned for the dance theatre production Cut the Sky (2015) by Marrugeku.
Poet and painter Edwin Lee Mulligan was born in Derby in 1980. He is also known by his traditional name, Warrda Lumbadij Bundajarrdi. He grew up in Yakanarra and now resides in Noonkanbah in the central Kimberley and in Broome. His grandfather Jimmy Pike is a well-known Walmajarri artist and is the reason why Mulligan embarked on a career in the arts. Mulligan’s work has been exhibited in New York, Melbourne, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Perth. Edwin joined Marrugeku for the dance theatre production of Cut the Sky (2015), for which his poems in ABR’s States of Poetry anthology were commissioned. Edwin’s work was selected to feature on specially made WA police uniforms and police vehicle wraps as part of 2017 NAIDOC Week celebrations. Recently Edwin received the Shinju Matsuri 2017 Aboriginal Art Award for his ‘Seasons – Sharing Country’ work.
Poems
'Sun Poem'
Further Reading and Links
Edwin Lee Mulligan's Associate Artist profile on Marrugeku
Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency profile
'Dreamcatcher' by Alex Smee from I Am An Artist. I Come From The Bush Series 1, ABC Open
I went where she reigned
far underground, deeper
than roots, in rooms hollowed
by hand and bone, where curved walls
contained my breath like lungs.
Passageways opened onto chambers
honeycombed in stone
where there was no light
and blind air read my skin.
Who painted the womb-shaped
echo-chamber with ochre veins?
The spirals on concave walls seem
to move with sound waves, fluid
as amniotic water, persistent as blood.
So far down, this far back, definition
fades. We braille a truth, one version
from things only guessed at.
In bone-dug bethels where perhaps
they incubated dreams, a woman
sleeps. In my palm, earth to earth
I hold her double: a small, clay statue,
rotund buttocks, fall of ample breasts
all luxuriant volume, prompting again
the old question: is she diviner or divine?
Annamaria Weldon
While women scanned the horizon, fishers
and hunters tended their nets, someone
etched the Lapwing crown-plumes in clay.
Abandoning hunger and
its frozen ground, they soar
South with the Grigale wind
Middle Sea harbingers of the
Lampuki-fish moon, its halo
a herald of autumn rains.
Outlines, incisions quicken those
plovers’ flight through terracotta sky.
A ghost flock, timeless on stone.
Annamaria Weldon
We met at the Neolithic display. I was staring
at the loom-weights, suspended in a glass case.
Handcarved stones, smaller than seashells
a tell-tale hole bored through their middle. That’s when
I noticed you, uncanny yet not out of place
holding a loom-weight. You seemed at home with fibre
your fingers felt its tensions, slack or taut,
sensitive to texture, strong hands threading
the weft, sinews familiar with the shuttle’s path
muscle memory of when to hold and release.
Back, forth, you weaved row after row, as friction sloughed
filaments of flax, infusing the hut’s dim light
with motes that clogged your lungs; each year
you strained harder and harder for breath. What
sustained you, arms aching as they bent and stretched,
shoulders lifting and lowering to the music
of your tuneless harp? Did your eyes sting?
Could you close them sometimes in that dark,
give yourself to the reverie and bridge the cleave
in time where we met, staring at those loom-weight stones,
handcarved and smaller than seashells, a tell-tale hole
bored through their middle. Suspended in the glass case
they have never stopped telling your story. Spellbound
I found myself called back by their slight shapes
by the weight of memory you left behind.
Annamaria Weldon
Alabaster: such a beautiful word for silence.
Neolithic Venus, was translucence eloquent
enough when stone was our mother tongue?
Yellow-throated crocus were strewn
at your feet, they fed you honey
and broad beans. Worship swelled
your breasts and fertile belly, men lived
without weapons, women were weavers
and potters crowned in cowrie shells
at death and in time their whitened bones
dyed red, with precious ochre
the blood of second life.
When survival required human milk,
herbalists were doctors and spirals holy signs,
hysteria a gift, fecundity revered
you were honoured as mother of the world
incarnate and neither clerics nor sceptics mocked
our fealty to the sacred feminine.
Annamaria Weldon
Annamaria Weldon’s writing residency with Symbiotica UWA prompted the poems, essays, and photographs of Yalgorup National Park in her last book, The Lake’s Apprentice (UWAP, 2014). She has just completed her third poetry collection, inspired by Malta’s Neolithic temple culture. She researched and wrote during several visits to her birth island, most recently as 2016 Writer in Residence at St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta. Annamaria’s previous collections were The Roof Milkers (Sunline Press, 2008) and Ropes of Sand (Associated News Malta, 1984). Her poetry has been published in Australian literary journals, anthologised, broadcast on Radio National, and has been staged in several collaborative projects including contemporary dance and art installations. Her awards include the inaugural Nature Conservancy Australia Essay Prize, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and a shortlisting in ABR's 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
Poems
'in the National Museum of Maltese Archaeology'
'Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, Malta'
Further Reading and Links
Archipelago, sleeping goddess whose body
we trample as tourists take selfies, bored lovers
seek mystery, stray dogs piss on temple stones.
Inside the sanctuary walls, torba floors endure
their bone-white ground broken as the silence
now deities are curios, gift shop souvenirs.
Asphodel and Sea-squill bloom in the corners of ruins
strewn like footnotes to remind us these shrines
are still alive. At dawn on the Solstice, an entry fee
is our only offering. Careless crowds block the portal
so the sun’s first beams can’t touch the holiest stone.
A child making a wild posy is chased by a man in uniform.
Annamaria Weldon
*torba is the Maltese word for hard plaster-like material made by the repeated pounding and wetting of several layers of Golbigerina limestone dust; it was usually spread over a rubble foundation for making temple and hut floors).
the text read:
Kissing you under an umbrella in rain
makes my list of favourite things;
a lunch crowd streamed around us.
we, dry in a cylinder,
sealed with that old golf umbrella’s
nylon night sky far from city lights –
I don’t recall why I didn’t walk you.
maybe the rain put its hands in pockets,
whistled east on Murray Street.
you left behind the scent of magnolia,
powder on a dark blue suit –
cheek relief on my shoulder –
foundation print on flax that escapes
authentication – a recollection I’ve kept
from the yellowing hands of sunlight, time and air.
Chris Arnold
you opt for form over colour
makeup smudged lenses
pale bare planes by the lakes;
a cygnet ellipsis in black
parenthetical necks;
white sky reflected in high water.
we sit where I have stayed
and watched an oak open and close –
green again – the bench
suspended on ampersands.
Chris Arnold
excerpt from Ligature
he drops his shoulders
lets out his breath
finds himself benched
between green wood slats and
a black plastic platter of sushi,
disposable sticks in his hand.
ache on his right eye like a river stone
thinking like five hands
at the piano. city stratified in front
his eye’s diameter
curves the park – half-moons grass
before his brain corrects,
sets it back flat beneath
palms pines poinsettias
that trail over asphalt;
ocean wind in
the river is busy
seems to flow back
toward the valley
as if behind its face
it replayed a moment
– something misspoken –
over and over
hoping the minute
were different.
he empties his breath
and says stop
the sound of her name
a song that doesn’t budge,
contains less
sound without her.
he begins. on the hill
he should turn right
but thinks of his chair
pinboard partition
the stench of lynx in the men’s
and walks forward:
North until the rail bridge
lifts him stops at its peak
as cars pass under: aluminium slab
and pantograph
hide passengers
sat silent still
as the city speeds beneath
Chris Arnold
excerpt from Ligature
her office kept cold
she shivers exhales
but never the satisfaction
of seeing her breath
a red-black plaid blanket wraps
her legs pattern
reminiscent of red dust picnics –
she’d pick spinifex spears
and snap them against
thumbnails pressed together
stalks shorter and shorter before
they refused her halving –
her rug synthetic soft
not the wire-like wool
that scratched her legs
through picnic dresses
in this somewhere her parents
she guesses – mouths
eyes hands closed
– locked postures unfigured,
only stone layered red on red
and green blades
she bends her back
sets weight against
arms on a white workbench.
Eyes focused close,
she slides steel between
eye blue slats
of a dragonfly’s thorax.
sinks pin into paper
and corkboard beneath;
sits straight
exhales again and thinks
this isn’t orthetrum caledonicum –
a holotype filed from light
while hers had paused
in still and cicada song
wings flat on acacia
Chris Arnold
Chris Arnold lives in Perth and used to work as a software engineer. He was published in Westerly’s first writers’ development program, and now works as the journal’s web editor. In 2017, Chris commenced a creative PhD at the University of Western Australia, where he is combining his background in programming with poetic composition. He aims to produce a narrative for hybrid print and electronic reading, and is working, at the time of writing, with generative text and audio.
Poems
'pinned'
'derailed'
'&'
Further Reading and Links
Uneven Floor: Six poems by Chris Arnold
'compression artefact' by Chris Arnold in Westerly
I am a dickhead in ways I thought I wasn’t
I am a dickhead in ways people who call me a dickhead can’t imagine
I am a dickhead in ways people who call me a dickhead can imagine
I am a dickhead with residues and hangovers of misapplications of beliefs
I am a dickhead whose interior was an adequate backdrop for exterior worlds
I am a dickhead who has tried to leap synaptic gaps to make conversation
I am a dickhead who in damning his past and his routes via heritage has liberated
none
I am a dickhead despite the awareness of the dickhead moves that preluded me
I am a dickhead who has secretly thought I am no dickhead and that I am defying
the paths of dickheadery I was injected with at school and by the state
I am a dickhead who lives and breathes the pollution I condemn and tries to hang
onto life like my life is precious
I am a dickhead caught in anaphora because the mantra is preservation and
conservation and forests still fall and bush is scraped back to bare bones
I am a dickhead whose epiphanies and self-doubts would liberate him from the
damnation of exploitation and Western subjectivity
I am a dickhead for allowing the mining industry any leverage over my life at all –
I use implements manufactured using their extractions, their abominations
I am a dickhead for not planting enough trees for using petroleum products
I am a dickhead for deploying manners as a token of respect when I sit uncomfortably
in a roundtable confab, adding my two cents’ worth
I am a dickhead for utilising and being part of a monetary system I despise
I am a dickhead for saying I need downtime like everyone else – there’s no time free
and when I fall into the lush up-currents of birdsong it is not enough
to say I am there, nothing in the absolute bliss of existence, as existence
is so tenuous and the deprivation of the right to a spiritual journey
for all living things nullifies the luxury of my own journey towards
enlightenment
I am a dickhead because I once thought sex was a natural process, was more than a social
construct, was a sharing on an equal footing if there was consent, as if consent
was chained by the privilege of gender and identity
I am a dickhead because I don’t think of my pacifist rage as a form of violence, and caught
in the paradox, critique each step I take with motifs of calm to channel my anger
I am a dickhead because I am prepared to give up my life in an effort to stop damage to
other lives – peace at all costs, my body crushed by machinery on the edge of a
forest – trampled down by the military, the constabulary, neo-Nazi Australian
patriots flying their Southern Crosses and Eureka Stockade t-shirts, the Liberal
party, the Nationals, the right wing of the Labor Party, and some of the ‘left’
I am a dickhead thinking my words might make a difference and the problem is not
in the make but the kind of difference words can bring because words
can’t be contained and controlled and nor should they be, surely? Which leaves
me with what at the end of the day? as the tradies say as I co-opt to my purpose.
I am a dickhead because I have so immersed myself in the consequences of self and what
constitutes the ‘I’, especially my responsibility to my own subjectivity
and the declaration that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
platitude which I don’t see as a platitude nor as just another variation on self-
mythologising which is an affirmation of purpose when I too am nothing in the face of
remorseless entropy and eschatology
I am a dickhead who won’t be held accountable when ‘the reckoning’* comes, comrade
I am a dickhead you might think is actually trying to call himself a dickhead to avoid
actually being called a dickhead or to say so while believing he’s not
but I can assure you I know the truth of it, and I am a dickhead
I am a dickhead who confronts people destroying the bush and throwing a tantrum
collapses as his heart falls out of sinus rhythm and brings the world of nature
he has constructed down around his ears
I am a dickhead who can’t ward off the truth with a mantra as the bulldozers and heavy
mining machinery are hauled slowly and steadily to the mines of the north
with vast areas of bush falling to blade every day and the roadside vegetation
vanishing despite a change of government as there’s no halting the loathing
and though there are many good people working to stop it, the hatred of life
beyond self and family permeates this world this dickhead is part of this world
this dickhead watches and dies a little more each day as he experiences and yet
cannot stop the ravaging the rapacity the cruelty of ‘development’ so what more
can a dickhead do than declare himself than plead dickheadery?
I am a dickhead who talks too much in a place where ‘lippy bastards’ like me are held
in contempt and I have the healed fractures of nose and skull, the cigarette burns
and the psychological scars to evidence this fact though my saying so makes
me more of a dickhead. Maybe you have to have lived here. Though that in
itself is no proof as the hearsay, voting trends, main street of town, actions
of land owners, and internet chatter will tell you
I am a dickhead who thinks he can in some small measure co-exist with the state he rejects
when the state murders and robs and bullies every nanosecond of its existence
while feigning innocence while claiming the higher moral ground while claiming
it speaks with the approval of the majority
I am a dickhead who thinks the majority doesn’t and shouldn’t rule that only consensus
has authority and a dickhead for whom authority is a lie anyway
I am a dickhead who thinks democracy is about oppression of minorities and not liberty
for all – never has been never will never wanted to be
I am a dickhead who won’t use pesticides or herbicides or fungicides but who lives
in a realm where they rain down from neighbours and shires and farmers
and contractors with the support and affirmation of multinational companies
that are eating the earth to its core and claiming they make the world go around
I am a dickhead who doesn’t think any job is better than no job. Not even worth
explaining that – a condescension that makes me even more of a dickhead
I am a dickhead because school mates, teachers, police, government ministers, right-wing
newspaper columnists, blokes in the pub, some friends and some exes, people
yelling at me as I march and protest as I read poetry in public, tell me so. Oh,
and some literary critics. Maybe more than some. I am not sure how that ‘more
than some’ sits in the calibration of the personalised (‘wank’) of the dickhead scale
I am a dickhead because I am loved by my son and my partner and my mother and my
brother and my mother’s partner and my auntie and uncle and cousins and maybe
a dozen friends. Which is not to say they might not privately think I can’t be
a bit of a dickhead on occasions but I am hoping against hope that they
can cope with that and it’s not simply out of politeness. What I appreciate
is their tolerance of dickheads, and I’d like to think I’ve got a bit of that as well
John Kinsella
*This is a reference to a communist marcher at a protest in Cambridge telling me that if I didn't convert from anarchism to communism, my fate would be decided at 'the reckoning'. – JK
Grasshopper on the window, the flyscreen, and stepping out
into the beige heat, over us. Tangled in our hair, hooked to our backs.
Grasshopper, cod wisdom. Grasshopper contraband on the eye-
out for plagues. The Australian Plague Locust and its tendency
to shift character when gathered together. In worship. In parliament.
O phase polyphenism, in which morphology and social disposition
shift. And the ag department would repeal their identities, make
mass hate an organophosphate reality. But the green, all the green
we make in the loving monocultural fields will be stripped away.
But it’s post-harvest, almost, and the wheat ears and canola pods
have been beheaded. The granaries are full. Nuseed Monola
worshipped in the holy of the holies. But then, as day cauterises
night, the Gould’s Wattled Bat retreats into its hollow, chatting
with others in its quodlibet way, illustration of the glories of sound
in the boombox valley. Grasshopper activates, and hops past
the early crickets and katydids. I read to the boy Keats’s ‘On
the Grasshopper and Cricket’, only distantly relevant, and I read
to myself Volcán: Poems from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
published by City Lights which was still radical in 1993, with Alejandro
Murguía’s plea in his introduction to American readers: ‘who could
act directly to stop the flow of military personnel and weapons ...
Those right-wing death-squads. That anthology thirty-three years ago.
Fables. La Fontaine. Grasshopper on the event horizon. And so many
of us here in a state of mumchance, locked in our anachronistic language
of debauch and abuse. In this age, this rise of global fascism. Beware
the Australian Plague Locust – native! The temerity of its Latin name,
the prejudice of its Wikipedia manifestation (‘significant agricultural
pest’), that first swarm recorded in the east, out of the east, 1844.
Prophecy. Francis Bacon thought so little of prophetic texts. Cut
to fit. And its grasshopper shape. Its colouring. That chiasmus of thorax,
that art we lock & load. I don’t know, Grasshopper, I don’t know.
I lack wisdom to render you unto discourse. Even to make you
as Biblical as you deserve. Holy text of annihilation. And now,
indoors, we watch you disperse, alone. Observing your solipsistic
truths. Your personal ontologies. Can I repeat what I heard
you saying to each other? ‘I don’t know, sister, and neither do you.’
Seemed wise. In the beds the nymphs will stir, awake to the poisons
then no more. The world is there to be fed. Worldly as we are. Mondanité.
And so ‘little difference’, or maybe so hard to tell, between locust
and grasshopper. And those swarms we must watch out for,
those swarms fought back with legislation, with a thesaurus of death.
John Kinsella
We are thrilled to find evidence of roos returning –
after being driven out of the reserve and slaughtered
by hunters, the survivors are finding refuge at Jam Tree Gully.
The vestiges of the old mob. And maybe new mob driven
this way by hunters down on Victoria Plains. In the long grass
they hide. They make tracks and graze and flatten
areas for rest. They are maintaining out of sight.
I walk with Tim at a tangent to the house, up towards the north-
western granites. The grass is long and wild lupins have built
a platform and it’s a hidden area now with hungry reptiles
waking. Haven’t seen a snake yet, but just today I found
the burrow of a bungarra – could tell by the patterns
of digging, by the flicked dirt, by the slender reptilian scats,
by the fresh brown dirt divined and fomented inside the hill.
A few days ago, the first bobtail we’ve seen since
the days grew long enough. And sun skinks! The awakening.
And today, I forge a way through the grass, up and across,
and Tim follows in my wake, cautious, cautious. We don’t
walk the roo trails because, I say to Tim, The chance
of kangaroo-ticks is higher in those avenues, in those
boulevards, in their town squares. And, what’s more, they
have their town-planning, their architecture, their road-
work to respect – temporary is never less in its design,
its purpose. With pollen Op-arting our clothes, with
honeyeaters chasing each other to the four corners,
we are inside something beyond our design, and that’s good!
Spenser wrote of the ‘carcass examinate’, and before roos
showed themselves here again, before the bungarra
worked its burrow, before the nests came thick
and fast in trees around the house, and before we knew
for sure that the tawny frogmouths have territory
marked up by the red shed, we could not be sure
that the destroyers of land – omnipresent – hadn’t
succeeded, hadn’t wracked life from the body examinate.
John Kinsella
It rained heavy, ridiculously heavy, when the heat
was at its peak, and then it went dry – the ebb & flow
of the surface-water, the water soaked deep. It’s
thin-on now, even vanished. A dry creeping towards
longer cold nights. The tank is down to 20 000 litres,
or thereabouts. And no clean air for weeks, as farmers
have burnt their tinderish stubble to ash, so volatile
the flames have mostly escaped, or been let go, to erase
‘shade trees’ in paddocks, and bush that has stuck
for legal reasons only. Fire, the trickster? It’s agony
to watch as we choke, eagles spiralling higher.
And the mistletoe birds are easing off, chasing those sticky
fruits on other hillsides. All that sunset collusion in the red
chest of the males – flashy, unexpected. But we notice
the females as often – no hierarchy of glory for us, though
they have their own codings, their own headrushes. But
while they were here, skipping unisex from mistletoe to mistletoe,
we were as ecstatic. And now at dusk, writing in dying
light, I sign off on almost four years of twists in the senses –
yesterday we heard a ‘new’ bird, and Tim found it singing
in the south-east corner of the block. A fantail cuckoo.
This map that won’t reveal the secrets. Try following it.
Between these poems there have – of course of course –
been many others. Those of lost trees, and damaged wetlands.
Of animals crushed and extinguished. Of wars and conflict.
The emulsion of sinews and xylem and phloem. The fencers
who in the name of work! take out as much bush as they can
to lay down new posts, those stretches of taut wire.
All of that. Proximity, and in the catchment of our days.
And reports from further afield. The boats turned
back on the high seas – the drownings we no longer
hear of inland, just a couple of hours drive from the sea.
All of those closed doors. All those birds that won’t fly again,
as once farmers killed mistletoe birds in their droves,
arguing that in doing so they were saving the native bush
they’d clear the following week, month, year, decade.
All of us in this temporal lapse – unique, trying to breathe,
take in the beauty, filtering contagions we release ourselves.
John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry are On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017) Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016), Drowning in Wheat: Selected poems 1980–2015 (Picador, 2016), and the three volume edition of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Five Islands Press, 2016). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of The Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.
Poem
'Detracking the Body Examinate'
'Graphology Endgame 100: I am a dickhead'
Further Reading and Links
Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist - A blog shared between poets John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan
for Lorraine and Tony
Not an expression of wealth but one of quiet desperation,
the heat and dry eviscerating hope – a giant shadehouse
of green cloth, and an above-ground keyhole
swimming pool, with avocadoes and ferns edging
the cement slabs, aura in the midday twilight.
And the red dust, too fine to shut out, decorating
the aqua-emerald waters, a wound open from an attack
of the inland leviathan, invisible as the filter strains
to remove impurities, leave pure as chlorinated amniotics,
and the dry birds squawking to be let in – shriek-caw-shriek.
Inland pool that was no waterhole, gnamma parody
down from the salmon gums and wandoos and pepper trees,
looking out over the sheep paddocks, the pig yards,
down onto the rat-tunnelled horse dam, out beyond the white-
walled house-dam of fated sailings, edge of the earth.
And this was in the Seventies, long before the rise
of pools on cocky properties, a nod towards a strong
swimmer, towards a childhood visiting the coast, a father
who loved the ocean. But there was a mother too, one
of the goldfields women who never learnt to swim.
Wheatbelt swimmers, wheatbelt pathfinders,
wheatbelt paradoxes carted in on the truck in riveted
steel cubes, brimming from standpipe flow; and then lesser
but regular cartings for ‘topping-up’. Record the volume,
pay up later. And all those kids travelling from far
afield, travelling to take a dip, frolic beneath the shadecloth
cathedral, bathe in the gothic font of swimming pool –
Australian crawl, breaststroke, frog-kick where the sun
denies the existence of amphibians, and dirt looks past
the sky for an opening through which rain might fall.
John Kinsella
Josephine Clarke
Landscape photographs from Black Saturday by John Gollings
Fremantle Arts Centre, July 2015.
enter a room and find stripes of night on each of the walls
pines have been hushed
black trunks block the light sky
and underfoot the ash is soft, waiting for wind
there can be no name for this
letters and numbers in degrees
of requiem so many points
of a pin where the fire spirit chose to go
a doorway into another room where undressed,
old hills roll in wrinkles
trees like stubble
on anatomy we don’t normally see
roads like a lover’s tracings
on flanks, shoulders
camera is a word for room in another language
– this is a tender lens
how do we forget
the defence of bark
how a hill names a track
the requirement of sun for shadow
photographs on a wall
paper
scissors
rock
Josephine Clarke
A version of 'Aftermath' was published in Westerly’s online edition: New Creative, September 2016.
– Dwerda Weelardinup
The whistle of the djidi-djidi on the army tank
slices the evening grey. Someone
is walking their dog. I am walking me
around this once defensive hill.
Gun House, Rifle Cottage. Cantonment.
Embers of a campfire through the scrub.
Quarried and tunnelled
– gradient constantly resettled.
At the Gunners’ Cottages,
new stair-rails gleam like epaulettes.
Reticulation runs on rolled lawn;
sand escapes across the footpath.
This hill is knotted with histories
the locals have long fought to keep alight.
What’s left is still
a glassy view of river and sea.
Cars sew a thread of lights across the Swan;
stop-start exhausts rumble at the red
beside an octopus with arms of rubber –
mural on the Navy Stores.
Djidi-djidi makes his
djidi-djidi sound. The lights turn
green; brake lights extinguish
one by one.
djidi-djidi – wagtail
Josephine Clarke
– photograph 1964.
at the bridal table
in front of Mill Hall stage
she is small
and tight lipped flowers
from somebody’s garden
in a bucket behind her head
the shell of her jacket
loose
as though she has been
deflated
her chest an empty cavity
all that sheen –
hat, suit
damask on the table –
cannot mask the weather
of another century
traced across her face
another hemisphere
hangs in gold hoops at her ears
in the primavera of her growing
great iron cannons
to the East of the Valtellina
blasted a chorus for her nightmares
la prima guerra
cast that strong jaw
her straight stare
did she choose not to understand
the photographer’s request
for a smile?
Josephine Clarke
we remembered
your face, pink, lit like we’d never seen it
when your hands at your shoulders met his
for the Pride of Erin
the ease of your gliding
for the three-four Modern Waltz
that marquisite brooch on the bodice
of your teal best dress
your stepping in perfect union on the dance floor
– how ineluctable your coupling
you could never forget
that quick step to expecting
the slow drive to Harvey
to tell your father, an internee,
or the nuns who sang you a full Mass
despite the rule of the Church
we watched
the slow unravelling
dinner to the dogs
chips of china in the wood pile
tears in the cold wash house
behind the steaming copper
we eavesdropped
on the soft vowels of dialect
with your allies when he was out
magari ... I wish
che pu fa? ... what can you do?
your laughter rippling
a corrugated scale by the end of the pot
we will never forget
you had to ask for money
he always asked what for?
at the end you called him
he sat by you his gaze adrift
you had fought each other hard
but stayed
till the end of the dance
Josephine Clarke
Josephine Clarke grew up in the South West of Western Australia, the daughter of Italian migrants. After gaining an Arts Degree and a Dip. Ed. at the University of Western Australia, she taught English at high school before travelling to other states and countries with her family. Josephine has had short stories and poetry published in Cordite, Westerly, indigo, Eureka Street, and the Review of Australian Fiction. She now lives in Fremantle and is a member of a collective that organises monthly poetry readings for Fremantle Voicebox, and has been actively involved with Out of the Asylum Writers’ Group, based at the Fremantle Arts Centre.
Poems
'Nonna'
'harbour'
Further reading and links
Cordite Poetry Review - Josephine Clarke
For my mother
The young men,
friends of our middle one,
camp nights in your bed.
Some leave it with hospital corners,
some leave it like a lair to revisit
and some make cocoons on top.
In most cases
they are shaping up.
On kitchen raids
they all report sound sleep
and I wonder what it is
that breaches their dreams
as they lie down
in this last contracted room of yours?
Can they imagine your life?
Is it the patina of photos, letters, legend –
all that dense action –
that guards their rest?
I wish for an instant
that I could share with them
my montage of you:
the stout baby with black curls,
the girl smiling with her shoulders hunched
at the Southern Ocean,
the young doctor tending
someone in an iron lung;
and sometimes our mother,
simply our mother,
in the garden,
white glints in the air,
flowers that have floated off your dress.
And now abrupt Trojan old age.
No, they don’t see it.
They can’t.
But part of this is what keeps them
coming back, I think,
that and the allure of your
strange come-and-go arrangements.
At fifty-one
I’m thankful
for every second
you have been away
and shown us all
that there is still life
to be lived
beyond convention.
Lucy Dougan
In crisis
I go to the local library
and do not take out
the book I find,
this one or that one first,
what matter?
Outside beside my car
sits a strange chrome and vinyl seat,
part of a vanity set,
stranded, hieratic, ruined,
like the beautiful straight-backed
low seated chair-people
of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche.
I do the visual maths.
Will it fit behind?
– no, there, rightfully, is the seat for our grandson –
I consign its odd allure to my phone’s photo bank instead.
I sit on it only once,
open its cream frayed seat
with its tooled insignia of promise
– nothing –
What does it mean
for home to be a failure?
What does it mean
for other places to be a failure?
I leave the throne to its own
mise en scène, neither
desolate nor replete
were I to claim it.
There is, after all, no mirror
in front of which to place it
though I fix my hair and do my lips
before I reverse away.
Lucy Dougan
The old cat and dog
now sleep in our room
in an uneasy truce
between the floor and bed.
It is as if they are not sure
the house exists
once we no longer light it
or move about it,
once we lie down
in agreement it is night.
It’s come to sit on my chest,
their Stilnox camaraderie,
and when I wake in snatches
I have thought different things.
Perhaps we are at sea
and this is our cabin
or perhaps without quite knowing
how or why
the rest of the house is demolished,
its surfaces wrecked, its innards divulged
in a fuselage of darkness.
Mornings are a strange venture.
As I keep night for them,
so they – treading out first –
herald in the day for me.
Lucy Dougan
The girl on a rug with a cat
is an entirely decorative proposition.
She curls, the cat curls, even the rug
displays some notion of this movement
with its diverting curlicues.
Life, too, is making a start inside the girl
although she cannot know this right now.
Some contract with another is being made,
even as we speak, on the rug with the cat beside her.
The striped ginger cat grows its hairs.
It is not the cleverest cat.
Somewhere some time a worker,
who cannot be revealed in this schema
but who nonetheless has left a signature of sorts
in all the curlicues, made the rug.
They weren’t paid well.
Perhaps they got by.
Were they a girl with life beginning inside them?
And did they own a cat,
perhaps a goat, or duck or a pig?
In this scene a lot remains unknown,
just as it always does.
Lucy Dougan
I lie on the couch
like a beaten dog
as Philip Mould advances
on his latest art forensics
and there are these absolutely
free and liberated daubs
of greens and browns
in close-up on the screen.
They are of the earth
in a surprising and counter way
to all that sateen, country houses,
rich people by the yard.
And from my beaten dog pose
I potentially fall in love with Gainsborough.
How could I have not before?
Philip Mould’s suit combos are impeccable.
He is always consulting experts,
always moving crisply through the
weak light of investigation sites
– the galleries – but his eyes
look infinitely tired
as if he has done so much
looking for us.
I trust his close-ups.
After enough experts
and trailing about,
there is Gainsborough again
with his louche letters,
and unsympathetic wife,
his treatment of waistcoats
and his small garden tray arrangements
that look touchingly a lot
like the moss tray gardens
of childhood
only more elaborate
with water features
and places to arrange a nymph or two,
a satyr.
They are a step up from what one
could get at the model shops,
though proximate, small feathery trees
and a brittle feeling of those bags
full of fake glittering lawn.
It leaves me unaccountably sad
that Gainsborough had to live with someone
who threw out all his dirty letters.
What a loss Philip Mould’s prim sidekick
says off guard, says passionately,
as the camera hovers over the tray garden
– this little grave of creativity –
and she’s right.
Lucy Dougan
Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2007), Meanderthals (Web del Sol), and The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), which won the WA Premier's Book Award for Poetry in 2016. She holds a PhD from UWA on representations of Naples. She currently works as Program Director for the China–Australia Writing Centre at Curtin University.
Poems
'Your Bed'
Further Reading and Links
Lucy Dougan's ABR contributor page
Cordite Poetry Review - Lucy Dougan
Curtin University staff profile - China-Australia Writing Centre
Poetry, in ‘stilling things’, as Martin Heidegger suggested in 1950, is nevertheless always restlessly active. These six voices are six stills from a fast-moving history of poetry in Western Australia. They are evidence that poetry can provide moments we can enter into in suspended silence while experiencing that movement and agitation so essential to important poetry.
Ben Lerner, in The Hatred of Poetry (2016), might be right in suggesting that the poems of ‘our moment’ are always about to fail us, but I guess for those of us interested in stilling things (and here there are echoes of William Carlos Williams), it remains important to know about things through poems, and to know poems as things.
I don’t know how different Western Australia is from the rest of Australia. I don’t even know whether there is one place called Western Australia. I suspect there are many Western Australias, and it will take many anthologies to get anywhere near a comprehensive ‘picture’ of the range of places Western Australia is. This 2017 selection is not representative of anything beyond itself, but it is also, I hope, a very Western Australian experience for readers. Each poet seems to me to represent certain aspects of the State, but also, and more importantly, each one is a voice stilling things in response to living in our moment.
Edwin Lee Mulligan (Warrda Lumbadij Bundajarrdi) works from Broome in the far north on its mangrove coastline, and is also from Noonkanbah in the Kimberley – a land once farmed by pastoralists into devastating erosion, and only won back by its Indigenous owners after nine years of legal battles. Knowing this, it is possible to connect to the stories he tells of dreaming regeneration into the land from beneath a blanket under the stars at night. His story of the crocodile participates in a long history of oral storytelling, and in the deeply human desire to find meaning, even enigmatic meaning, in the figures and events we witness in nature. Mulligan’s stories soar as jagged in front of us as those eroded cliff faces, termite mounds, and volcanic cores do throughout the central Kimberley. My conviction is that these stories need the presence of an audience. You have that role to play here. I hope you visit them and can stand still inside them.
From the southern reaches of the state, John Kinsella, fresh from his epic Graphology project (Five Islands Press, three volumes, 2016), adds to this selection a more intimate and wistful tone than we are used to from him, but still a voice that embraces Aboriginal history and Indigenous prior claim; and while pointing the finger at (for example) white destructive farming practices, he announces these as examples of the ways we all avoid truth, avoid thought, avoid responsibility, and most of all avoid lyric presence in our environment. The way he celebrates the visit of a small, rare bird nearby is something. His riff on the grasshopper revives and revises a creature that maybe offers itself as doppelgänger, mirror, scapegoat, and even an emblematic figure that should be on the State’s coat of arms. Mostly, though, I want you to read his ‘I am a Dickhead’ poem for the distinctive and unforgettable contribution it makes to Australian poetry of political protest infused with dry wit. It’s not just Western Australia that needs such a voice.
Lucy Dougan, editor of the 2016 WA States of Poetry anthology, and herself a prize-winning poet, brings the intensity, cultural savvy, and churn of big-city culture to her poetry. She too, though, is in the business of stilling things, as her superb series of meditations in The Guardians (Giramondo 2016) has shown. I trust her close-ups. Her girl on a rug with a cat is as ekphrastic as anything, so much so that the poem seems to be all picture until we pay attention to the tones sparked and carried by the line breaks. Just as in The Guardians, and in all poetry where there is room for the genuine, Dougan brings our attention to the forgotten, the cast-off, the easily ignored objects, images, memories, and animals around us. Western Australia has a world-class poet on its hands in Lucy Dougan.
Josephine Clarke is here as someone familiar to the Perth poetry scene, but nationally a new voice, and one that comes at us with a powerful opening poem that is an uncompromising portrait of a marriage at its best and worst. In relatively short free verse lines sometimes scattered on the page, Clarke picks her way through the details of experiences so deftly that you can’t be sure how she has arrived at those vivid effects and frightening ideas.
Chris Arnold is another emerging poet. His poems are mostly parts of a longer narrative sequence. In ‘Derailed’, you do feel the rails of a rhythm that would make it difficult to change one word of the poem as it descends through the page and follows a series of events dictated by a city landscape and a set of motives we can, at this stage, only guess at. There is nothing predictable or less than observant and thoughtful in each phrase and idea. I expect that this is poetry hard won from many drafts, poetry that will reward further visits because there is much to notice if one can be still with it.
Annamaria Weldon is an experienced mid-career poet whose work is poised, fresh, and confident. These poems are from a manuscript in preparation. Many poems in the developing collection are inspired by Maltese temple culture dating from the Neolithic period (5,000 BCE). Growing up in Malta, Annamaria Weldon rambled among these ruins as a child, years before they were listed as world heritage sites (temple offerings now replaced by entry fees, as she notes in ‘Goddess we trample’). She has been in Australia since 1984, and it was in Australia that she became aware of the land holding within it many ancient sacred sites. Annamaria Weldon revisited her childhood sites during an artist’s residency in Malta in 2016. Her poems approach the knowledge that these temples were there at a time that was before-writing – that they existed in a sense as the texts of their time. What is it that a Neolithic alabaster Venus is saying to us?
All in all, I am excited by the poetry given a showing in this small anthology. I think it speaks to diversity, sophistication, music, landscapes, and the engagement of Western Australian poetry with our moment.
