Poem for the Day - Old as Cows Are (from the Irish Suite)

I visited Ireland for three weeks in September 2011, and walked along the same roads and laneways every morning while staying in county Monaghan, at a writers' centre. I photographed interesting landscapes and came across this derelict house. It was too overgrown to go inside, but I could see inside, nevertheless.

Old as Cows are

A house sits in a field

uncared for.

Grey calm of slate roof

and a chimney’s cold air, puffing.

Year after year this cottage,

married to weeds, dies in bracken

and an ivy graveyard. Death for life.

Trees holding onto their view,

blackberry vines curl with fruit, saplings

spire by sentinels of wired posts.

A door sits back like a mouth where

no food enters. Windows look out

from a darkness within. A magnolia tree

is the last, healthy touch of a family,

planting. The raw stillness of it. 

And they who farmed here, gone,

foisted with the fight of poverty. White-

washed bricks, old as cows are, strengthen

in the sun; a face that sings to no-one, or

for whoever comes.

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Poem for the Day - Horses on the Hillside (from the Irish Suite)

Horses on the Hillside

An old world is taking place
just hanging there beside brush & lake.
Two horses, a mare & colt, graze on the
hillside, plumb with the lowering of cows.
They seem content in the softwood swirls
of green, of wildwood terraces.
It speaks volumes for them.
Dark & light brown rumps twitch. Muzzle to air
assumes the guise that no-one is watching.

Leaves fall without weapons. Birds tap
on old growth-rings of trees. This county

goes on the same, wearing its wings of colour
without the noisy flight of airplanes.  
Two horses in a paddock, looking at each other,
flaked grass in the corners of their mouths.

Listen, you can hear them whispering. 
Do they sense gutter fire, farmhouses alight?
Are the fields shaking off distant rumblings,
where now they live in the hollows
of grave stones? You say, a stream of men
still might come, saddle up, bolt away,
back into a conspiring night
of murder & mayhem.

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Review of Arrhythmia by Richard Rossiter

Review by Helen Hagemann
 


Arrhythmia – symptoms of unreliability

Arrhythmia is a book that contains twenty-six short stories by a West Australian writer, Richard Rossiter. It is also his first collection published by UWA Publishing. Rossiter is a retired academic, having taught literature and supervised postgraduate creative writing students. He has also judged numerous literary and writing awards (including the WA Premier’s Book Awards). He is a consultant editor for Papers and has been the fiction editor for literary journals Indigo & Westerly.
    There are many well-written stories in this collection, including various generational stories of two families (there’s a family-tree legend in the back of the book), with the main family headed by Samuel and wife Ellen. We are led into their farming life with sons Winston and Jack in the first story called The Brother. It's basically a story about the harsh farm life and headaches. 
    One of the better stories that evokes pathos is The Boy who Lost Time. This story begins with young Jeremy being given a watch by his grandfather, only to find that his father keeps hocking it to pay for his gambling debts. Prior to a visit by his grandfather and grandmother, and not having the watch (it's in its second cycle of use), Jeremy tries to win a watch at the Claremont Show, attending with his friends. After spending all his money, he eventually knocks a gold watch from a spinning glass machine, but it is not silver like his own, it’s too big for his wrist and he knows he cannot show this watch to his grandfather. When the grandparents arrive, Jeremy runs away to avoid the inquisition and a betrayal of his father’s illicit habits.
    
Writing is centuries old. It is a silent honing, a courageous externalization of the internal workings of memory, experience and our connection with the world at large. It is craft that needs daily practice and commitment. Standards, and certainly a moral compass are needed when we convey certain storylines and archetypes to our readers. They will soon become aware of any amorality or unreliability, for example, towards a female protagonist by those who have crafted a male literature. Female readers are also concerned with stories that have an ordinary voice and possibly from the same consciousness. Over time female readers have developed a gender, race/class conscious “ear”. In other words we can hear the disingenuous language if conveyed about our image, especially in language such as “small breasts, lively nipples… her eyes, dark and intense, conveyed whatever men wanted them to do”.
   Shall we say, then, the male writer who purports to understand the mind and body of a woman takes risks.  Roddy Doyle’s novel The Woman who Walked into Doors is an excellent example of the male writer taking those risks, especially writing from a female point of view. The story is so confronting and heart-wrenching - yet as a woman’s experience of abuse - it is “believable”. Doyle creates a seamless transition from a male consciousness to a female’s – a writer using his moral compass and training.
    In Rossiter’s The Trophy Girlfriend, the main protagonist Laura is problematic. This is conveyed in the ending which appears ludicrous. Laura having been previously touted as a strong and empowered woman, and decidedly collecting her own trophy by cutting off her lover’s two dog ears, leaves in tears after dining with her female companions.  The narrator states, 'she could not control the tears'. This is where the text is incongruous and certainly not a female rationale. As readers we may suspect that either a). The author could not think of a better ending, or b). It is the male narrator’s accretion of the weak, stereotypical female. The narrator, perversely follows Descartes’ mind and body law, provides no criteria by which its scope or reliability can be gauged. (We achieve a moment of consciousness when the narrator is unreliable). There is a rigorous descriptive and fundamentally flawed diversion going on. The male narrator operates from the male mind, psyche, experience, and the academy, and we are thrown off track, brainwashed again by an androcentric point of view, like “Laura’s going off the rails, Laura’s not a virgin, possibly “frigid”, better still a “sexual siren”. If we are consoling or understand the writer’s possible shortcomings, we will remain like an audience in a silent movie house - complicit, bewitched, beguiled and ….1950s stuff. If we say to ourselves, well, it’s just a story, we will pass-over such phrases as “her body was a commodity” in the face of our own characteristically human traits as women who have been conditioned by this dominant patriarchal consciousness. We will evade the system of existence of a male rationale. We will be fooled by the etymology of the “narrative”, the known feminine “weak” ending. Laura is really not empowered (as we are led to believe), she is weak and leaves in tears. I find this scenario rather at odds with the creation of the character, especially being strong within the paradox of taking her own trophy.    
   In closing, I have rated this work 3 out of 5. The collection does have many worthwhile stories told in the third-person point of view, where the male characters are believable, and that do offer a reliable narrator. Yet the work is spoiled by the intrusion of the authorial voice that seeks to convey a certain weakness in women. Arrhythmia appears to live up to its name when it comes to a subset of pre-feminism (1950s) and gender issues, i.e. symptoms such as weakness, fluttering, dizziness, being light-headed or feeling that your heart is running away.
    Rossiter is a good writer but one hopes that he might stick to what he knows best, stories from his own experience/memory/male consciousness, without the subliminal academic theory.

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Review of Ladylike by Kate Lilley

 
 Ladylike by Kate Lilley - reviewed by Helen Hagemann
 
Poetry is often a mixed-bag. On the one hand you have lyric poetry which stems from the Romantics to modernism, and on the other - post- modernism - a term mainly aligned by poets who philosophise that not all poets lead eccentric lives, do not embrace "form & feeling", nor are they interested in the personal pronoun "I", or the one true meaning of a text. Hence, post-modernism is meant to free up old restraints to create renewed meaning. Lyn Hejinian and J.H. Prynne (Jeremy) are two main exponents.

As a reviewer as well as a reader of poetry, I am interested in the experimental, the avant garde and a certain amount of l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry. I especially like the American poets, John Ashbery for his topsy-turvy inventiveness and Brenda Hillman who breaks-up language. Kate Lilley's poetry, however, is what I have mentioned earlier - "a mixed bag". More to the point, her poetry in Ladylike appears to be all of the above, i.e. modernism, post-modernism, the lyric, with some wider references and obscurity thrown in.

Taking the first section The Double Session into consideration, and having studied Dorothy Hewett at university, I empathise with Lilley's deep binary of the mother/daughter experience. Lilley questions this association in the Forward's Fifty Minutes, "In the criss-cross of mother and daughter, student and teacher, poetry and criticism, what is mine and what is hers?" I would say many poems enmesh Hewett's story, many intersect as the mother/daughter experience. After all Dorothy Hewett was passionately ideological in her personal life as well as an intense feminist, esp. in her work (novels/poetry). My favourite novel being The Toucher.

Of course Lilley is heavily influenced by Dorothy's oeuvre, but I believe within these kinds of influences she is a poet expressing "ecriture feminine" i.e. the disruption of the phallogocentric nature of language. Lilley, however, and she has to, marks a different position of voice and style, compared to Hewett. The section title poem in "The Double Session" (as a division of two stanzas) appears to be about Lilley's parents - Dorothy and Merv Lilley, both writers. In the last few lines she states: "how it made you feel small and want to leave/ searching for the lift and then the bus-stop,/ the distant clack of typewriters in the night./ Once our work is done these tapes will be yours."

In the section Cleft, When Ladies Meet is an interesting poem that reveals the same angst for freedom and the poet's search for independence (away from Mama).

Goodbye Mama, you made me what I am
Impeccable, light-fingered little Marnie/Margaret/Peggy
You can keep the mink I stole for you
I'm young and if I go now I won't have to lose my mind

The poem, Coil, impeaches pathos no matter whose experience it is, and more so because there is a black & white photograph of the young Dorothy Hewett, the epitome of innocence?

A lilac sheath to cover you
your wardrobe of opening nights
reduced to a simple party dress
snipped curls in plain paper
your bed hacked to pieces for the skip

It is the final line that brings the emotional engagement for the reader as a universal childhood experience. However, we cannot read these two poems as the basis of the collection. The rest of the poetry in the first section highlights the narrator's search for distance and her own ‘desires’. It is in this section that conveys the complex words 'queer/lesbian'. Many of the poems in 'The Double Session' appear as a way in, getting to the heart of the matter.

In the two final sections of the book, Lilley goes far beyond my university studies and knowledge. Both sections 'Ladylike' & 'Round Vienna' have black/white pictures of women, and in the poetry I become lost. The re-reading of these poems over a long period of time may be necessary to interrogate the narrator's implications. Further reading may also help, and in this way understand how Lilley's mind works, the intertextuality, the philosophy, Freud's Dora and the 1673 Mary Carleton, along with other ideas contained in these poems. I find her sparse writing style interesting, insightful, and a poet to admire. But I just can’t engage emotionally with these sections. Lauralude is a poem from 'Ladylike'. You tell me?

Proceed haughty coquette
footling kewpie
gingham haze

Vellum umber rubbermaid
a fair sea of permanent waves
cornflower corrigenda

My review on "Ladylike" by Kate Lilley can also be read here @ http://helenhagemann.blogspot.com.au/p/reviews.html

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