First Taste

by Tiggy Johnson

ISBN 978-0-9808136-0-9

‘First taste’ will be launched by Emilie Zoey Baker, this Sunday, 28th November, from 3pm at Caffe Sospeso, 428 Burwood Road, Hawthorn. All welcome.

Tiggy Johnson writes in straight, honest language. The poems collected in First Taste are not for academics, they are for readers, as all poems should be. Johnson draws a narrative bow and fires us through the trials of life, from love to loss, from birth to death, and laughter to sorrow.

The title poem is a journey through vast desserts, tracing a shared life through cakes – from a first taste of butterscotch pudding to an older person’s appetite for anzac biscuits and blueberry muffins. The poem draws a parallel between tastes and life, as we get older the rich sweetness of life is replaced by the safe and bland.

Coburg High continues the exploration of reminiscence as the narrator passes a set of buildings that once meant so much. A flood of memories rushes the page familiar appropriate to any reader who attended high school.

The introductory set of poems concludes with I remember as the narrator recounts childhood memories such as bowling her eldest brother middle stump and then never being allowed to play again. The sequence of memories concludes with a harsh reality ‘I don’t remember / ever missing it’.

The second “set” of poems is themed around pregnancy. Week sixteen removes the gloss painted over pregnancy as Johnson describes with brutal honesty the fatigue entering the second trimester.

Baby’s health is everything is a song of frustration. In spite of the best initial intentions the speed of the world and the ever presence of commercials push a mother into the fast food aisle of life. The poem closes with a sad resignation.

It’s like… should be essential reading for all males in order to gain an understanding of the horrors of morning sickness. This piece reminded me of Dr. Robert Winston who, in ‘The Body Human’, while sitting in a rubber dinghy in rough sea swell explains the feeling of morning sickness as “at first you think you’re going to die. Then you’re afraid you’re not.”

The facts injects a twist of humour into the pregnancy themed section. Through the agony of labour the narrator can “laugh” –

Like

whispering to your husband

you were sure the baby

was going to come out of your arse

only to discover later

there is no such thing

as a woman in labour

whispering.

daddy’s girl takes the up till now light hearted collection into the darkness of loss. The piece imagines the thoughts of a father on what would have been his daughter’s fifth birthday. Johnson describes the images of a child at play, but the dark tone creates a soft focus dream like picture, the poem concludes with a resounding stanza,

he tries to avoid wondering

how different his memories might be

if you’d been born

just two days before

Solitaire continues the dark path by recounting the final days of a loved one lived out in a nursing home. The poem explores the regrets of missed Mothers’ Day lunches and draws a vivid image of ambulances that arrive without any sense of urgency.

Shopping for girls is a return to the earlier theme of an individual trying to stand against multi-national commercial pressure, similar to the exploration is Baby’s health is everything the poem traces the ever increasing pace of growing up experienced by today’s children.

The collection draws to a close with Concluding and Dear Dad. Johnson brings the collection full circle as she explores the end of life. Concluding takes us into a hospital ward as a father endures one last visit from his daughter and grandchildren. The pain is expressed with sorrowful lucidity in the stanza –

We don’t stay long

you’re too tired to say more than thanks

to the kids

for their homemade birthday cards

and the cupcakes

you won’t touch.

Dear Dad is almost a tanka in its brevity. Straight to the point, it expresses the only regret of a surviving child as being that the end had to come.

The collection reads as a whole with a natural progression and delivers clearly and without any airs of pretension that we are the sum of our experiences, there is pain in birth and relief in death. But, regardless of whatever life can throw at us, butterscotch sauce is a cure-all.

The Nine Flaws of Affection

by Peter Farrar

Ginninderra Press

Peter Farrar feeds words onto the page like a priest delivers the Eucharist. Each word is selected specifically to add to the arch, and just enough words are used to reach resolution. Peter Farrar, as the medium of the stories, has removed all unnecessary words, including some personal pronouns, leaving us with nine portraits of debilitation delivered with extreme priority. Each story has proven itself among the best literary journals in the country, including Overland, Wet Ink, Etchings and Page Seventeen.

            The nine flaws are detailed in the stories of the collection, nine portraits of the seriously disenfranchised, victims of loss either through war, betrayal or simply, life.

War takes its toll in Anzac Day where the true courage faced by veterans nearing the end of their lives is conveyed, not the ‘John Wayne saves the day’ type tale but the real anguish of those sent to their possible deaths by absent leaders. A grandfather recalls his time to his adult grandson, Farrar draws parallels of fear within the two lives lived fifty years apart and under different circumstances, one struggling with the memory of war, the other facing the difficulties of life.

The First Casualty is a returned service man, or rather, mostly returned. Missing his legs and one arm he lies in bed building up the courage to ask his father to help him die. The father acts as a representation of society’s inability to face the consequences of war, being so uncomfortable around his returned son that he needs scotch to be able to face his him.

Journey With My Father is a frank and honest story of a man who’d grown up with his father missing in action in Vietnam. As the father is found and his remains are repatriated any hopes of closure are dashed as new wounds are opened.

These stories go beyond the typically didactic ‘war is hell’ as they examine the true costs of war as borne by the individuals effected. Costs that remain long after the last shot is fired.

Betrayal is examined in Comas, Two Thirds of the Truth and Dust. In Comas we are placed within the frustrated head of a coma patient listening to family members in his hospital room but unable to speak. His story is only shared within his thoughts as his parents argue and his brother threatens him to remain quiet.

Two Thirds of the Truth starts as a road story then seamlessly twists into a tale of infidelity. Two men drive away from Melbourne seeking new lives. The driver is fleeing an unfaithful wife. An accident leaves the passenger unconscious, within his wallet is a photo of the driver’s ex-wife. The driver repays the betrayal by setting the scene as if the passenger was driving alone. The passenger is left to wake in utter desolation and face the consequences from which he was attempting to drive away.

Dust is a bluesy story of how a strong man can be brought to an emotional bomb state by the seemingly unrequited love of a woman.

The saddest, and as such my favourite pieces of the collection regard losses caused by the transpiration of life. An old man relives his marriage through his paintings in The Twenty Faces of Lorraine. Farrar sketches with words the shaky pencil strokes of a husband doing one last drawing of his wife after her death and recounting the tales behind the other portraits hanging from his nursing home room walls.

When I Sang takes us into the ‘brotherhood bin of single people… all dumped in here so others can sort through and pick out something they like.’ Dreams of a young man’s singing career are reclaimed in a small bar after being suspended for mortgage and day job.

Affection is a story of loss and loneliness, not just because of the death of a mother but a whole sad life of isolation with Eleanor Rigby overtones.

Simply, The Nine Flaws of Affection is a fantastic collection. Peter Farrar manages to perform autopsies on ordinary characters, revealing the incredible sadness that thrives within, making their tormented lives extraordinary. I know these stories will haunt me until I read them again, and again.

 

Music for Broken Instruments

by A.S. Patric

Black Rider Press

RRP $1.99

 In order to write an nonsubjective review you have to read ‘from a distance’, evaluating every word, balancing every line, consider whether there is a consistent tone, whether the verbs active, etc. A.S. Patric’s words draw you in and set you floating in an ethereal bliss thus making it extremely difficult to review objectively.

 Patric literally opens with a King Hit, ‘drop a brick / into your soul / kick out the heart / of the old man / wandering, drooling / roaming your head / like a lost word / the dementia of your dreams’. These words demand attention by slapping you across the head like a mob gangster until, as Patric closes the poem, ‘the brick is a relief’.

 Paper Targets is about the angst of being a writer, or more specifically submitted works. This has, of course, been done many times before, but not in the style of A.S. Patric. Unfortunately to understand what I mean by this statement you have to take in the whole form of the poem, I cannot merely quote a few lines, so consider this a teaser.

 The meaning of a dream is an autotelic piece defying interpretive analysis, read it four times and you’ll come away with five different interpretations, and this is the point; sometimes it is simply the beauty of the words. This may be a difficult concept for students looking for meaning in the random tea leaves of poetry but is completely accordant with Poe’s The Poetic Principle and the entire Art for Art’s Sake movement. And why would you want to look further when you are given lines such as ‘when you need to get back / to reality in a hurry / just the old man / waving at you / in a cloud of flies / that we used to call God’.

 Q & Q closes the collection but leaves so much more open. The poem is a series of questions that if you typed into google could destroy the internet! ‘Are we more disconnected? / Are we more superficial? / Does the internet cripple the creative life?’ Questions fall upon questions into a concrete poem style spiral, spinning us out of the collection to seek our own answers.

 I started this review with an explanation of the difficulty, I’ll finish as an apologist; A.S. Patric pushes the very edges of poetry without falling into the self-serving chasm of esoteric avant-gardism, if this is music for broken instruments may they never be repaired.

 Music for Broken Instruments is available from the Black Rider Press (http://www.blackriderpress.com/shop.html ) website for $1.99 in an awesome retro typeset, that, as Maxine Clarke writes (http://web.overland.org.au/2010/05/28/poetry-review-%E2%80%93-music-for-broken-instruments ) begs to be printed.

Ashley Capes is the Poetry Editor for Issue 8 of page seventeen.

 Stepping Over Seasons

by Ashley Capes

Interactive Press: ISBN 9781921479328 (pbk.)

RRP $25.00

Simply, Stepping Over Seasons is a fantastic collection of short poems that will appeal to both poetry lovers and readers who may have been burned by poetry in the past. Ashley Capes has captured themes such as love / loss / longing, suburban streetscapes, the plight of Outback Australia, and the anguish of the writer’s life, in poems that can be studied for their form or enjoyed for their content.

When you read Capes’ work a distinctive style becomes quickly apparent; he has an ability to form a poem around a seemingly ordinary object. As Justin Lowe writes on the back cover ‘You sense you could point to any object in a room and Capes would conjure the ghosts of a hundred pairs of hands.’ Capes creates a vivid image of an object and the reader is treated to a reconsideration. This object could be small, like the wedding ring in other objects, or an entire house as in shell, once filled with life and memories, the house is left empty;

            our house is a shell again,

            not precious

            and beach-like, just

            a knock for someone else to answer.

This poem, as indeed the entire collection, displays an honesty that is rare in contemporary poetry where so much emphasis is placed on craft and polish. Two poems late night and fujin’s bag expose Capes’ struggles with the life choices of a writer.

Late night compares writing to other arts such as music and movies, and the frustration that can be felt by trying to extract an emotional response with just lines. The twist is in the closing stanza of the poem is the artist’s dilemma, do we live life or create art;

            I guess the great lie of our time is capture-

            … everything can be caught, … so we don’t have to appreciate

            anything in the moment.

The angst of the writers life continues in fujin’s bag where the late night routine of the writer is contrasted with the everyday happenings around him, happenings that he is aware of and yet not a part of; his wife goes for a glass of water at 1 am, strong winds blow outside, all the while the writer is;

            still moulded

            to the desk, blinking

            back sleep, convincing

            myself, somehow

            that all this

            darkness is necessary.

A closing stanza that places in context the solitary life of a writers’ choosing; not book launches or festivals, not drowning in accolades and riches; but late nights fighting sleep while life continues around and without you.

 Capes’ skill in capturing the struggles of rural Australia has been acknowledged with a prize in the 2008 Ipswich Poetry Feast Open Poetry Section for farm and a commendation in the 2009 Rosemary Dobson Prize for small town.

Farm is weighed heavily in metaphors of death as small towns contend with drought;

            hills are bone-grey and a cold hand

            massages the empty river, no prayers

            swim this belly of dust,

            no whispers to quicken fruit.

Likewise, small town describes a vacated town, signs of whatever life the town had are now collecting dirt and any hope of a saviour has been replaced with moonlit dreams;

            no one lives down there

            where the surf plays dead

            and moonlight walks on water.

If I was forced to pick a favourite from this collection it would be by the curve. A poem of loss, the emotion is captured in the description of a simple tea cup ‘shoe brown inside’. The cup sits in a vacant kitchen, other standard cooking utensils surround it, but the cup stands out as it appears to wait for its owner’s return;

            but somehow your teacup

            shrugs off pain

            with a sweeping shadow

            cast low over the dish-rag,

            to me it looks like you might

            return any minute.

Capes has gathered not only wonderful poems but a great collection of objects and moments in Stepping Over Seasons, as he writes ‘everything can be caught’ but  I would add that not everyone has the ability to capture, certainly not as well as Ashley Capes can.

This review initially appeared on the Overland blog, on 12 May 2010.