DAVID MUSGRAVE
The Five Islands
Press New Poets: Twelfth Series
Carlton: Five
Islands Press, 2007
Craig Billingham, Storytelling, ISBN 9780734037497; Nandi Chinna, our only
guide is our homesickness, ISBN 9780734037459; Angela Costi, Salt &
Honey, ISBN 9780734037466; Sarah
French, Songs Orphans Sing, ISBN 9780734037480; Ella Holcombe, Welcome/No Vacancy, ISBN 9780734037473; Adrian Robinson, The Slow Country, ISBN 9780734037503
Each
32pp.
“that sanguine
mentor of mediocrity, has done it again.”
— Justine Lowe on
Ashlley Morgan-Shae’s Love Trash[1]
“Australian poetry owes Five Islands and Ron Pretty a debt of gratitude.”
—Warwick Wynne[2]
The Five Islands Press New Poets series began in 1993 and has (for now) reached the end of its life with the publication of this, its twelfth series of six “new” poets – “new” in the sense that the series was intended for publishing the first book-length collection of poets, many of whom had been knocking on the door of book publication for some time. For better or worse, or a bit of something in between, seventy-two poets have been unleashed on the Australian poetry reading public in the space of fourteen years. That’s a lot of poets to have been put out there, and their reception has not always been greeted with uniform approbation, as the different opinions of Justin Lowe and Warwick Wynne might suggest. Certainly, under the editorship of Ron Pretty, the New Poets series comprised somewhere between a quarter and a third of the press’ total output, which is a lot of first poetry books among a lot of poetry books in general. There seems to have been a certain faith in statistics in such an approach, and the number of poets who have gone on to bigger and better things would appear to be vindication of this approach; and yet… there are those, like Justine Lowe, who will find that the good is the enemy of the best, who would prefer a little more selectivity when it comes to the two hundred odd poetry books that get published in Australia each year, and who have become a little exasperated, at times, with Five Islands’ prodigious publishing program and the substantial variations in quality that are a consequence of such scale. To a degree I sympathise with this position; but credit is due to its obverse, that gratitude is owed to a publisher who has done much to promote Australian poetry by publishing poets who would otherwise have struggled in the wake of the withdrawal of the major publishers from publishing poetry, and by giving book publication to emerging poets and making careers in poetry (for good or for ill) possible.
Nevertheless, Five Islands has, on the whole, imposed a fairly
homogeneous aesthetic on the poetry it has published, and this seems to form
the nub of Lowe’s criticisms: that such homogeneity is more a testament to
the press, and its reception, than the poets themselves. Given time and space,
the poets often come good:
Eighty percent of the project’s output has been of a very high standard…
However, no-one should be searching for adventure here. This is and always has
been precision poetry. Like precision car-making – safe, reliable, smart,
stylish, and utterly homogenous.[3]
What, then are the discernible traits of
the Five Islands publishing project? A tendency to prefer sincerity or authenticity
of experience over technical innovation or formal exploration; a distrust
of ‘academic’ poetry, whatever that may be, or at least a wariness of poetry
which veers away from the lyric, the press’ most valorized mode; a predilection
for concrete images, preferably taken from everyday experience. Perhaps most
tellingly of all, these preferences have been elaborated on a large scale,
so that perhaps the distinctiveness of individual voices tends get lost in
the overall homogeneity of the press. My preference would be for fewer new
poets to be published in more substantial books. It is interesting, therefore,
to examine this last hurrah of the New Poets in the light of the press’
achievement as a whole.
One of the most assured of the New Poets is Craig Billingham, whose collection Storytelling is preoccupied, as the title suggests, with telling
stories about the poet, his friends and family, and his and their experiences
in a range of different situations. The poems are evidence of considerable
technical skill, as in “Four Sonnets”:
I said something I might have thought
but left
unsaid. In bed, your back turned
a cold front that ached for
better weather.
I lay awake, already being oh so clever.
but clever in a
smart-arsed way Billingham’s poetry is not: rather,
he has a deft metrical sense, well structured poems and a delicate, occasional
rhyming sense. He is at his best when writing about people, although
occasional, incisive observations of the natural world are a revelation: “the
chisel-wind cajoled old mountains,/ changing them
imperceptibly to new ones.” (“The Eighth Day”). As
with much Australian poetry, a sense of place inevitably asserts itself,
despite the wide range of stories related in this collection; when Billingham relaxes from narrative, a powerful lyric sense
emerges, as in “The Slow Path”,
where gum trees are jacketed, thick-skinned,
mindful through winter, then on, and into spring.
In
contrast, Nandi Chinna’s our only guide
is our homesickness is a collection of highly personal (and personalised)
fragmentary experiences, some of which appear to start nowhere in particular
and peter out before they have a chance to establish themselves. Occasionally
the poems are poetic in an obvious way: endings which attempt poignancy and
resonance, but which are let down by an over-reliance on adjectives and the
occasional awkward inversion. For example,
Only desperate claws of saltbush
and the miraculous silver of twisted trunks
somehow cling on, against the flattening
southerly. (“Sea Caves”)
Nonetheless,
what appears as fragmentariness may be metaphorical of the homesickness,
presumably, with which this collection is concerned.
Angela
Costi’s Honey
and Salt is a sensual mélange – her longer lines are suited to contain
the excesses (sensual, emotional and sexual) which are the main themes of
this predominantly romantic collection. Occasionally, these excesses manifest
themselves in the language, with often overly elaborate images cropping up
awkwardly (”Questions hung like sons from gnarled tress/ left to reek”) –
but her writing is at its best when most direct, sensual and forceful, as
in “Peloponnese Sunset”, where the hills “have views you can open your thighs
to”. Her Cypriot heritage is a dominant theme, and it is a shame that the
Greek words, poems and phrases which crop up from time to time are not translated
in full, although there is a notes section which gives some useful pointers.
While the energy of the various stories of family (black sheep, ancient betrayals,
lust and war) makes this an interesting read, it is marred by occasionally
unconvincing attempts at being poetic, such as “the flirty flutter, flippery
feel” of an unborn child. There are stories to be told here, though Costi’s
brief biography tells us that she is “freelancing as a writer, playwright
and dramaturg”: I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these poems
reborn in a dramatic form.
It
is hard to understand why a talent as sophisticated and accomplished as Sarah
French has not seen book publication before now. At 38, she is the second
oldest of the poets published in this series: one can only assume that she
has endured the same difficulty of obtaining book publication which even established
poets face and which, with the contraction of Five Islands’ publishing program
and the demise of the New Poets series, will only get worse. Her work is technically
the most varied of the six and she excels in packing a good punch-line. Takes
this example from “Kiss”:
every slip
of the tongue
is a lover’s
kiss.
Her
prose poems are well crafted, especially “Next-of-Kin”, which is a stand-out:
Why can’t dreams give me back my son? My life left me, the man said. I mean my wife. She removed all the doors from their hinges. She said they reminded her of coffin lids.
Her
imagistic sense is spot-on, and she is able to elaborate images into
convincingly complex and moving metaphors, as in “Echo”, which talks of grief
over a loved one’s absence “like skin silently knitting/its way across a
wound”.
By
far the youngest of the series twelve poets is Ella Holcombe who, her brief
biography tells us, “lives in Brunswick (VIC) with a bunch of stray boys and
a large orange snail”. Surrealism is the plâte du jour of her poetic feast: dreams and
night scenes and dream-like urban episodes populate her collection, in which
a sense of the tragic, that which cannot be wholly contained within poetry,
is never very far away. Most successful are the surrealistic pieces which
concentrate on the image and what it can evoke, for example, “Seven Reasons
for leaving you”:
1
I had a large bag of stars
and I shook them up like popcorn
…
5.
At the bottom of my whiskey glass
I found six baby teeth
Holcombe
is also capable of considerable pathos, as in “Summer
funeral” where the description of her friend’s mother’s funeral resonates successfully
beyond the understated detail:
my friend sits silent
in her new summer dress
the church is hot
her younger brother beside her
kicks softly at the pew
with his heels
no one tells him
to stop
Holcombe’s
collection contains many possible threads for her development to follow: it
will be interesting to see which ones she chooses.
Adrian
Robinson’s Slow Country is concerned with music and
silence – and his preoccupation with music is among the most intense I have
encountered. “The rules for prepared piano” have an epigraph from John Cage:
“If something bores you after two minutes, listen for four/ If
it bores you after four, listen for eight” – useful advice for all art forms,
no doubt. Luckily, there is nothing boring about Adrian Robinson’s writing.
“The rules for prepared piano” is a beautiful sequence of 7 short poems, revealing
a profound interest in, and understanding of music and sound. This preoccupation
is not limited to music either: “Relics/faultlines”
is a long-lined sequence concerned with the relics of human existence in the
Australian desert and the faultiness, both physical and spiritual, running
through that existence:
When you sit down in the desert, it takes time for the mind
to calm itself,
away from
all the distractions of the world and the everyday.
Only then do you hear the silence. It echoes, airless and
bible black, and then it roars
like a faultline collapsing under the pressure of its own cursing.
It roars.
Robinson’s
ability to hear, feel and see through these faultlines
makes him one of the most interesting poets of this series, and certainly one
of the most original.
The
age difference between the oldest and youngest of these poets (nineteen years),
their diversity of backgrounds, styles, themes and,
most tellingly, the wide range in poetic accomplishment would seem to put
the lie to the claims for the utter homogeneity of the press. It is hard to
tell: 32 pages per poet is hardly enough to get a feel of any distinctiveness, other
than the most obvious competencies and deficiencies. I look forward to reading
more substantial and varied collections from these poets.