THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, # 24, July 2011

GREGORY DAY

The Uncool Eloquence Of Mark Tredinnick
(Address given at the Melbourne Launch of Fire Diary
at Collected Works Bookshop on May 27, 2011.)

I always think that a good book is not one which you necessarily enjoy but one that you remember. Likewise, the test of a poem for me is often something similar – not necessarily a matter of subject or style, nor metrical pyrotechnics or even the cleverness of its intellectual riffing, and definitely not its erudition or intertextuality, which too often are worn like the watch on a busy man’s wrist, or the mobile phone that goes off in a movie. The question for me, the measure of these things, is somehow about about the ear and the tongue - has the poet a capacity to make a line, or even an image or a joke, that I want to say again, that resounds in the ear and is pleasurable well afterwards, even becoming necessary to repeat. By heart, as the saying goes. By heart.

This very requirement points to the unusual, and probably unfashionable quality in Fire Diary, the eloquence of Mark Tredinnick. Fire Diary is full of memorable image, joke and line. As Pound would say, perhaps a bit disingenuously for him, it has ‘a quality of affection that carves the trace in the mind’. No mean feat. This is the first thing that struck me about the book, and soon I found myself thinking of it in geological terms as some kind of magnetic anomaly in the poetry world. Or in ecological terms, as charismatic fauna. It was the nature of its cadence. Its ability to be poetry with all the rigour that that implies, and to communicate vocally from the page. It was its preparedness to take on the mantle, the reality of its voice.

The narrowness of my view, and I do admit it’s narrow, is such that whenever I read an Australian writer, poet, novelist or otherwise, there is a way in which I am looking for the role he or she might play, not so much in the national conversation, but in a kind of parallel national constellation of artists. I think I listen out for a pitch with something unusually real about it, something inexplicable too that I can’t trace through the grids of reason and therefore something symbolic of the mysteries of existence. Something both of, and beyond, the muck and verbiage, the bowel movements of the consumerist media. I need to situate the voice too in relation to what for me remains an unfederated landscape – this still moving continent.

It’s because this country we’re on is such an old distillery, such a strong and, in terms of biodiversity, such a copious drop, that I’m always fascinated to observe the ways in which we’re still getting to know it, even those whose families have lived here for thousands of years. To me Mark’s particular talent, and a very distinct one I see it as in the Australian context, is his ability to write from a fair dinkum knowledge of that landscape, a micro to macro understanding of it, and then to transform that experience of the world into a properly epigrammatic line, such as – ‘who we are is who we’re not. Whatever it is we’re part of’ - or, ‘The night smells like any one of a dozen childhood camps/in which the present has pitched her tent’ or ‘mortality is the price we pay for form’, or ‘the world is a mystery occluded by reality’ or, the soul will always choose a holy mess above a tidy fraud’, or even, referring no doubt in this case to the ignorance of those who can’t distinguish symbolism from historical fact in the Book of Genesis, – ‘seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory’. In this ability to harness aphorism and resonators Mark blends a great gift for listening with lyrical ears to the outdoor tunings of existence. He does it with a defiant neo-romantic belief, it’s a kind of heroic dare I’d say, a belief, or at least, in his words, a ‘trying to believe’, in a world intact, in the beauty of the processes of the universe, the brokenness of wholeness, as opposed to dogmas of wholesomeness, the world both violent, rapid and glacial, and sweet.

Now coming from a man literate in geology, in astronomy, in ornithology and meteorology – which he would call the study of ‘blue machinery’ - but also in the death of species and the self generating masochism of post industrial capitalism - ‘there aren’t many wild places left: death is one’ -, this belief in the sanctity of nature, which is everywhere implied in these poems, this almost boyish heartfeltness integrated with the grown-up accomplishment of his poetic craft, is quite special. With these talents converging Mark becomes a singer, motivated by, and loyal to, the impulse of beauty in the world, because, once again in the words of his book: ‘no-one reads poetry to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change/the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall’.

And here’s another one – ‘Let your mind be like the fox you caught earlier eating pizza from a box/on the porch in the dark: go hungry, but not too hungry. Know a gift/ when you see one. Take it but leave the box. Turn but don’t run’. Again, a quality I’d like to re-emphasise about Fire Diary, beyond its pretty uncool delivery of wisdom into the ironic heart of contemporary poetry, - is how well Mark knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the NSW southern highlands, closer to the sunrise than where I live on Victoria’s southwest coast, and there’s obviously more European trees, but nevertheless there is sometimes a unifying sense amongst those of us who live outside the urban areas of Australia that the very nomenclature of the landscapes we inhabit make some of our work seem a little intransigent or even obscure to editors living in the big cities. Sometimes when urban editors see bluestone laneways we see the basalt the lanes were cut from. There are many things in the daily life of the natural world which don’t make the news or the cultural tourism brochures, nor David Attenborough or even YouTube – and which, when described and reembodied in words and then sent away to town, can seem just like a sword stroke in the water.

But here in Mark’s book is not only an overcoming of that difficult translation, but also an exactness about the phenomenological experience of the emotionally struck human figure in the massive midst of stars, birds, storms, dawns, trees both European and Indigenous and rivers both fucked up and restored. That’s another dubious view I personally suffer from – I squint at nature poems sometimes, seeking out, with an initial lack of trust I must admit, the proof that the poet is not just some subjective romantic, that the poet truly knows the hill of which he or she speaks, not just as fodder and not just as an artefact, as a living hill that I might know too, experientially, not only by the digestion of Common and Latin names, not by a grasp even of geomorphology or the igneous past, but as a personal witness in time, a witness to the particular music of wind amongst its trees, the emotional feel of a possum landing, as Mark writes – ‘like ordinance on the roof’, the leadlighting of cicada wings, the mad scale of plovers, - all these things are in Fire Diary - Mark captures the sound of plovers so surprisingly with the question that I’ll always ask now when the plover calls - ‘why will a river not stay in the ground?’

Fire Diary is in this sense the real deal, the craft-quality of it is a given in Mark’s case and of course there’s not too many first books of poetry of which you could say that - this book has, both superficially and profoundly too, been a long time coming.

What Fire Diary has above all, what I admire about it so much, and why I’m so glad to help launch it here in the south, is its personal vulnerability - Mark himself I think calls it a ‘confessional ecology’. For me it’s a capacity, simultaneous with his geomorphological understanding, astute metrics and attention to imagistic detail, to love and cry on the page, to be embarrassed on the page, to be clearsighted on the page about danger and risk, but to include wist and sentiment and the plangent among its palette, to invoke Gaia in full lament of our destructive idiocy, and to hell with the consequences. For me this makes Fire Diary not only the work of a wordsmith I admire but of a mature person, someone who’s lived and decided to live on. It is a mature book, not only in this personal sense but I think its intellectually grown-up as well because it is such an emotionally intelligent collection. I sense a lack of fear behind the writing of these poems that perhaps, amongst other things, a musical ear and private suffering can give you - it gives Mark access to his art, and a sense in it of him living his own dedicated life, perhaps not his first life, perhaps even his second or third, - ‘Your new life’s just your old life with a book in its hand’ - but a life therefore he has made himself, a poetry he has both chosen and laid himself open to, with the inspiration of the earth, I must say, like olivine-rich basalt at its core.

In these poems there are the strains of making a living – ‘writing 50 dollar poems at a 1000 dollar desk’ - a hint of Francis Webb’s idea of the poet as Franciscan jongleur or fool, as he struggles to write in his home shed which once housed the fundamental productivity of cows; the primary relief and joy he finds in his wife and children, in sex and fatherhood; and also the preternatural him, in the midst of writing the poems. Of course there is literary lineage, there are in these poems what George Steiner would call ‘real presences’, or what Jed Rasula in his recent groundbreaking study of ecological imperatives in American poetry, would call ‘compost’ – there’s Robert Frost and Robert Gray, Walt Whitman and Rumi and Charles Wright, there’s an enormous North American influence actually, a deciduousness you could say - he’s at his most vernacular in his wit but quite trans-Pacific in his cadence - and there’s always an Asiatic spareness, which at least implies the minimal – he’s too loquacious to be a minimalist proper, but there are the open empty spaces on the page winking at the reader…….

And there’s also GS, the writer and academic George Seddon, who Mark has spoken to me about in our conversations, a huge figure I know in his coming-into-a-voice, a mentor of landprints, and who is mentioned here in the fifteenth Eclogue – ‘The places don’t sing,/ GS said to me once; in particular they don’t sing you-/ George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week/a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it/They don’t sing, GS; they just are, That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach’

That is a lesson which is perhaps never fully learnt but which speaks of a rich bequest, a basically Copernican lesson so crucial in the current plight of nature that we trash. And a lesson recast here by the poet, in homage and well aware of its lyric lineage – Wallace Stevens’ Idea of Order At Key West, Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow, to name just two.

So Fire Diary is a moment I think, at the risk of coming on too grand, a distinct moment in the timeline of our poetry here, where the astringent drywitted truth of this worn-back place comes together with the succulent riparian eloquence of a man prepared not just to quip or allude or re-arrange or meditate, but to openly sing and cry. There’s a lot of people who have been waiting for this book to appear for years. I know Mark has. But good things take time. As a man in Borneo said to me once – the good life moves at the pace of the river.

Lastly, I want to say that the title piece, Fire Diary, a talismanic poem I think which may well grace poetry anthologies for years to come, demonstrates best the value at the heart of this collection – in short, Fire Diary, the poem and the book, shows us exactly how much we have to fear, and why we should not fear it. Quite an achievement really, the achievement of a poet. It’s cause for celebration tonight. Well done Mark. Thanks, and congratulations.

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KRIS HEMENSLEY & LIBBY HART

"THIS FLOATING WORLD" : A CONVERSATION*


KH : Congratulations on your new book! As my own publishing reduces so my admiration for other writers who continue to publish & perform increases. It even excites my curiosity for reentering the fray myself!
In your written inscription in my comp of This Floating World (Five Islands Press, '11) , you thank me for "agreeing to take the journey" with you... 'Journey''s a good word... a journey, like this conversation... We can never assume we've begun at the same place though we may hope, eventually, to find ourselves on the same page! And being writers as well as readers we're even more eccentric in our disposition than the impartial reader. Our partiality is formed by our own journeys (--suddenly remember here Pound's great word "hewn", from Whitman's wood?)...

LH : I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound, until it is officially called “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing-still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when it becomes independent and exposed in the world. But This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an aural map of the island of Ireland...

KH : And Poetry forces one to agree to yet another embarkation --more than a nibble & a taste since this book isnt a miscellany but a sequence... I'd love to hear you read How Like --it's a poem outside of the central sequence, --and maybe those first poems are the proem?-- And it's simultaneously physical & mental --palpable (of the real world) & poetical --it contains the beautiful, it alludes to properties of language --it usefully leads one's reading in different directions...

LH : I find it interesting that you selected How Like for me to read from the individual poems at the beginning of the book. This poem actually has nothing to do with Ireland, but it does contain similar themes the songline encapsulates. The poem was written for Bob Dylan and it is included in The Captain's Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70 (published by Seren Books, Wales). The premise of the anthology is basically 70 poems by 70 poets to celebrate Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday last month.


How like

And I am wondering about your face,

how it alters when a mood takes hold.

Such a changeling

like a sparrow, like a burning flutter,

higher and higher up into the tree.

Like a breath by cold night,

the crispest revelation breaking ice.

What is left is the warmest sensation at the pit of stomach.

How like a stretched metaphor you are,

how like broken branches from an apple tree.

Like its fallen fruit half-eaten by animals.

How like a mystery,

entangled by the twang of a country that can’t own you.

How like an endless path of thought.

How like a mesmeriser

with the power of foresight.

How like his instruments buzzing blackly across my mind.

How like the concept of the wheel,

of the science of silence.

How like etcetera in the tall, green grasses.

How like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by.

How like the moon in all of its tiredness,

of the river who waits for the clearest direction to your door.


*

During the editing process, Lyn Hatherly (of Five Islands Press) chose a very small handful of poems to be included at the beginning of the book. I was interested to see that she had selected this poem because it goes very well with the themes of the songline as it reiterates the idea that ‘we are all made of stars’, that we are connected to all things and to each other. My main aim for this poem was to say that although we are flesh and blood we are also the trees, the moon, the river, the birds and so on.

KH : I love "like a sparrow, like a burning flutter", and "like a stretched metaphor", and "like etcetera in the tall green grasses", and "like a slipperiness of truth slithering by and by"...
Can I share with you my stance at the beginning of my own serious writing, in the 1960s, when I would have been appalled by such a poem! I'd decided I was against metaphor, eschewing its obvious vehicle 'like'. I was for the concrete & against the poetical. In the '70s I wrote a prose-piece for the poet Alexandra Seddon, called The Danger of Like. I feared the trap of endless analogy, of the poetic cliche. I much preferred the idea of an equation or relation...
Of course I must remind myself that the literal subject of the poem is, as you say in the opening couplet, "And I am wondering about your face, / how it alters when a mood takes hold..."
And this combination of the literal, natural subject & cadence, and the metaphorical/analogical is probably your 'crucial contradiction' (as I call it), --essential to the edge or frisson of your poems...
As I say, I gradually yielded! Twenty or so years ago the lid came off & I became a poet --as you've always been!

*
I read your first book, Fresh News From the Arctic, when it was published by David Reiter's Interactive Publications in 2006, and then forgot about it until late last year when we were reintroduced at that most dramatic time in the life of this bookshop... And I couldnt help misreading the title as French News From the Arctic because of the way we could use 'French' as the particular sensibility it is --symbolistic, aware of language as its material, as its terrain, unlike our time's empirical, naturalistic style --unlike so much English-language poetry, despite the centrality of such wondrously 'French' (metaphorical, adjectival, analogical) writing --Shakespeare to Hopkins --Shakespeare, who is at the heart of English poetry, or let's say British poetry, so we could include the 19th Century's great gift of Gerald Manley Hopkins...
I think there are clues in Fresh News to the journey, the different kind of journey of This Floating World --or does a line like "I was leaving the known" speak to both books?
So, do you have a 'French' attitude rather than 'English/Australian'?

LH : I don’t see my work as being influenced by French poetry, although I am an admirer of it. If anything I have a European focus to my work. I guess that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but Europe is where my head is most of the time. I have to be open about that. And because of this I am drawn to European writers and to an overall sensibility that could be defined as European.
In terms of mainland Europe I would say that Russia has been a profound influence on me. And obviously I am drawn to Irish poetry and also to Scottish poetry. I think the key for me is I love colder weather. If you give me plenty of sunshine on a calm and pleasant day it’s not going to do a thing for me. What I love most is drama in the landscape – raging winds, a roaring sea and buckets of rain. I love the commotion of it and its mystery. I am most happy with all of this whirling around me and perhaps that is why I am so drawn to places like Russia and the Arctic, as well as Ireland. And obviously the Russian and Celtic psyches are things I can relate to very much, so these elements help me to connect to these landscapes and their people.

KH : Tell me about the Irish journey now, the language & the subject... In my head are other Australian-Irish poets, Robyn Rowland, obviously, Colleen Burke, Buckley, of course. (This is the third time I've formally addressed the subject : the Irish- Australian symposium at Queens College/University of Melbourne late 90s; and the examiner's report I wrote on Maria Hyland for Marion Campbell; and now today.) And would you read Wind-bent grasses...

LH : Regarding Wind-bent grasses, Figure at window, Dog : the songline (This Floating World) was born from an extensive road trip I undertook when I first visited Ireland in 2005. Wind-bent grasses and Figure at window, as well as Dog were things I witnessed and interpreted on my first day. And I must say that the majority of the journey the songline takes is part of the road trip’s route undertaken at that time. We began our journey in Belfast and moved west and down through much of the Republic.

The wind-bent grasses at Ballintoy are long and uncut by human or sheep. On the day I visited Ballintoy there was also a wild and whistle-soaked wind that made their plight in the world so much more dramatic and forsaken. Additionally the Portrush voice conveys what I saw from my hotel window that evening. I think this part of the songline is not complete unless I can also read Dog for you this afternoon.

*

Wind-bent grasses – Ballintoy

I’ve been sweating and weeping

against the bridge of days like a mute,

singing only to dogs.

If nothing else, they come to me

with their wet noses

snorting around,

digging up my very soul.

Let me speak

for it has been so long

since I’ve let my voice shine.

Give no mind to that mad wind

too full of itself. Listen only to me.

Catch my intentions in your hands,

grab them from that whistle-soaked air.

Don’t move away

let my words be heard,

it’s been too long in the waiting.


*


Figure at window – Portrush


The red tail lights of cars

move away from the town.

They leave in twos like devils’ eyes

down and down the cliff.

Looking north,

all this allegorical darkness.

It’s full and full-blown,

hiding those Portrush clouds.

What is it that the old man said?

That the north is where the devil lurks

catching the unwary in their tracks.

The small door in the church

was kept open for him.

It swung with a groan so fresh

like a child just home from school.

And now the legs of small dogs skedaddle

black and white in their pairs

with only the street light to guide them.

Small animated bodies

windblown by the Atlantic

with their man hunched over,

a cigarette in hand.

They’re going against the wind now, deep into it,

with those devils’ eyes so close behind.

*

Dog


I look up

at the nostrils of him,

wide with in-breathing.

His Irish legs keep walking him and walking me.

An Irishman needs his shoulders to walk.

Hunched over, it’s a process of swinging the arms,

swingin’ until the only thing that’s real is going forward.

Hard and soft, and hard again,

pressed flatly into wind like it’s a tug at something real.

It’s the black night we’re fighting, that we press through.

*

KH : Aware of the Irishness now --the oral oomph of the Irish (& the Scottish & the Welsh), which English poets of those British Isles find amazing & imposing whilst holding it slightly away --their continuing suspicion of everything from Yeats to Dylan Thomas... Specifically Irish in you... Remember Heaney on the Gaelic : I dont write in Gaelic, he says, but if it wasnt for the Gaelic my English would be different...

*
The songline, as you call it, which I've always associated with terra firma, is water-bound, all the way through --right from your quotation of Leanne O'Sullivan, "The ocean itself is flesh / and the delicate psalm of the heart is / beating somewhere in the core"... Your songline reminds me of both mysticism's songs to the beloved, and of actual flesh & blood's relations...
It's ghostly & physical simultaneously... And the Irish landscapes echo the speaker as her, his, their voices echo it... "The Floating World : earthly plane of death & rebirth"...
I've thought of this poem as water-bound but it's just as much wind-blown isnt it?

LH : I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying place through the voices that speak; therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I respond much more to the Irish landscape than I do to Australia. In fact I take great spiritual solace from it and if we must get into specifics I consider Ireland as “Country”. It is a very special place for me.
Australia was experiencing severe drought the first few times I travelled to Ireland. Ireland in contrast is so full of water. There is a great deal of seepage through its bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells and so on. And it is a relatively small island with shoreline wrapped in waves. Rain and mist are also never too far away. Given this I created a songline that follows the direction of the wind or rain. If a reader were ever to follow the narrative with a map they’d probably ask, ‘What on earth is she doing?’ because in some areas the voices go back and forth due to these elemental forces. The wind is a faithful presence in Ireland, especially in the west, and I wanted to address both this and the mutability of the island.

*
The other woman

The weather is like a ghost tonight

embracing all things,

yet our breath covers distance.

And breath is touch.

It comes like storm, full with lightning

full with high cloud cramming the sky.

And this breath comes like wave,

rolling over and into this room

like a king tide sinking the night.

This breath is like moonlight,

falling across my cheek, and then onto lips

in all its elucidation.

And this breath speaks,

this breath that finds me in the darkness.

This breath that falls and is fallen.


*

Man in Pub and Woman Responds : yes, there are different tones of voice in the work to suit each occasion or place. Man in pub is based in Strabane, a border town where not a lot happens. The only thing really to do in a place like this is to go to the pub for a drink and this invariably means there might be a bit of flirting going on as well.

*

Man in pub – Strabane


These are love’s borders.

And here is a hand.

It becomes a thought

too full of going forward.


*

Woman responds

Desire is on his mind

when these fingers talk.

Love is on my mind

when I reach out to hold their words.

I become a murmur

not meant for translation

as his fingers curl

into the very heart of things.
*

As with many voices in the work the Tourist in Limerick is actually my own voice speaking. I have visited Limerick a couple of times since but my first visit was especially fraught because we had pre-booked hotel rooms in the wrong side of town. I have since learnt that this particular pub has a notorious reputation – and you have to remember also that Limerick’s nickname is Stab City. In all my years of travelling it was the first time I ever seriously considered leaving to find other accommodation, but I persevered. Even so there was a point where I went up to my room and looked down at what was happening on the street. After that it was all I could do to lie down on the bed and write out my frustrations.

*

Tourist – Limerick


The cry of a gull from God-knows-where

And the church bells

And the cars forever passing

And the girl screaming at the stopped car

And the horns tooting

And the girl saying: That’s crap, that is

And the little man in the passenger seat laughing his head off

And the lights of Paddy Power, all bright and shiny

And the smell of coal-smoke

And the cheap hotel room

where 1,000 other people have rested their sorry souls

And the broken tiles in the shower

And the chenille bedspreads

And the lace curtains that embrace the smell of cigarette smoke

And the red-emblazoned newsagent across the way

And the slick of the road as cars drive by like one endless engine

And the L-plate drivers who park their cars like dodgems

And the presence of a lack of presence

(and all that is left is desperation)

Here, a young girl scurries with a 12-pack of toilet rolls

against the roof of a pram

There, an old man sways in a gale all of his own making

*

Going back to our words on Ireland and Irish “seepage”, it is interesting to note that Australia and Ireland share a serpent mythology. The serpent of the Dreaming is masculine, however the serpent in Ireland is representative of the mother goddess. It is said that she went underground with the introduction of Catholicism and the late poet Michael Hartnett explained once that only a select few can feel her vibrations. I think this is very interesting on many levels and obviously it helps to reiterate my creative notion that Ireland is unanchored, that it sways in its sleep and so on. I must also say that in ancient times Ireland was referred to as the far island of the ocean. Something, I think, that is still fitting in many ways. Given this I will finish up with a poem that illustrates this:

Woman drawing the curtains of her bedroom– Carrick-on-Shannon

My thoughts are with you tonight,

they belong where your feet walk.

They go down to the river

its bend, the curve of serpent

slunk beneath.

Body of water,

a wetness, sucking. A splash, a drop.

Her belly swollen and swallowing,

sinking down with a swish of tail.

Blubbing and lugging

this weighted island-world,

a push of girth

netting our own wet bodies

of muscle and tide,

the heart-thump of land

unanchored below feet.

This island of the ocean,

how it sways us to sleep

with its breath of undertow,

its guardians of storm above our heads.

Their hint of speech falls on sodden ground,

near-words reach me.

*


The acknowledgements at the back of This Floating World are extensive, but I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Lyn Hatherly for putting up with me. I think we worked really well together and it was a pleasure to work so closely. Thank you also to Katia Ariel and Kevin Brophy, and to Susan Fealy who had input during the early stages of the editing process.

I’d also like to thank Samantha Everton whose wonderful photograph, Solitude, graces the cover of This Floating World. When I came upon this photograph I actually lost my breath and hoped upon hope that Samantha would agree for us to reproduce it for the book. Thankfully she did and I will be forever grateful to her for that because it is a bright ruby jewel of a thing that has become a wonderful talisman for the next journey this little book will take.

Thank you Kris for launching This Floating World today and for Lyn Hatherly for introducing us. Thank you also to Sean Kenan and Graeme Newell for their wonderful music and to everyone for being here today. Thank you.

oOo

[*The Conversation is a recreation from notes, memory & afterthoughts of the event at Collected Works Bookshop, June 18th, 2011.]

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CONTRIBUTORS :
GREGORY DAY lives in Aireys Inlet, country Victoria. Several novels including The Patron Saint of Eels, & The Grand Hotel. His website is, http://www.merrijigwordandsound.com
[MARK TREDINNICK, author of The Blue Plateau : A Landscape Memoir (UQP, '09), Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, '10), The Little Red Writing Book ('06) amongst others. See, www.marktredinnick.com.au
LIBBY HART edits an international online mag, 5 Poetry Journal, wch can be viewed via her blog, theworldasaroom.blogspot.com

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #17, May, 2010

GERALD FITZGERALD


Regarding Bertram Higgins (1901-1974)

oOo

[Recently, Gerald Fitzgerald became interested in Bertram Higgins. He popped into Collected Works bookshop one day & asked if I had anything by Higgins or if I'd even heard of him. Much laughter when I said that indeed I had heard of him, in fact I'd dealt with him at some time when I was poetry editor at Meanjin Quarterly (1976 to '78 inclusive). I believe I was sent a batch of his poems by a friend or relative (perhaps his son) or it could even have been A.R. Chisholm... I've searched for my Meanjin era correspondences but turned up nothing; I cant find my diaries for that period either. If Meanjin retain records of correspondence between editors & contributors then perhaps the original submission & my response might turn up. My memory is that I was singularly unimpressed by the poems & probably said so. One must recall that I was the poetry editor newly appointed by Jim Davidson (Clem Christesen's successor), specifically to bring the 'new poetry' to the magazine --and mine was a particular 1960s'/'70s modernist perspective tempered only by a brief which required me to select from the best of the in-tray in addition to soliciting from the poetry world, local & overseas, I inhabited. Today I'm embarrassed by the memory of that rejection note. Had I been responding to Bertram Higgins at almost any other time in the last 30 years I would at least have been interested in his historical position. Melbourne cultural history wasnt the same type of preoccupation for me in the mid '70s as it was to become. Actually, I dont think it was until the Mallarme in Australia conference in Melbourne, September/October, 1998, curated by Michael Graf & Jill Anderson, that I was reminded of Chisholm, of course via Christopher Brennan's centrality to the theme. This doesnt mean I'd have necessarily accepted Higgins' poetry for publication back then, but would certainly have welcomed the figure he was. Today I'm sure I'd have found something in his manuscript to publish if only because of the importance I now attribute the byways, the undergrowth, the 'secret history' of this (& any) place. Naturally, I asked Gerald to write me a resume of his investigations...
Kris Hemensley]


oOo


April 30th, '10


Kris,

This is purely to keep you up to date with my Higgins news. Unsurprisingly the 'subject' burgeons, due almost entirely to his being forgotten more or less totally for a few decades. I'm not all sure anyone has had a go at surveying his multiple activities: poetry, literary reviewing, and editing avant-garde journals devoted to literature and the arts. One problem has been that so much of this activity occurred in UK, roughly between 1921-1939.
But unlike numerous expatriates he returned, twice; firstly between c.1931-33 and then c.1946 till his death in 1974.

On the bits and pieces I've so far garnered, I don't think there's any doubt he's at least a most interesting figure in the story of Australian letters, and most certainly so with regard to the era of modernism.

The following are some of these garnered bits:

- 1925-1927. Asst Editor, Calendar of Modern Letters. Higgins was a friend of Edgell Rickward (ed of CML) at Oxford. There they seemed to have initiated the idea for the Calendar. Higgins was a frequent contributor of poetry and reviews.This journal was highly esteemed by FR Leavis, and (in The London Magazine Oct 1961, 37-47) by Malcolm Bradbury who declared it in 'many ways the best' of the 'three great literary reviews of the 1920s' (the others being The Criterion and The Adelphi). In 1986 a further substantial review of the CSM appeared in the Yearbook of English Studies, V.16, 150-163, by Bernard Bergonzi.
- 1933. FR Leavis. Towards Standards of Criticism. Selections from the Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-27). Numerous of Higgins's contributions appear in Leavis's selection.
- 1931. Stream. Higgins edited (and founded!) this Melbourne journal upon avant-garde Art and Poetry. It lasted for three editions (July- September, 1931).
- 1981. Bertram Higgins, The Haunted Rendezvous: Selected Poems.

As well, there are numerous biographical bits and pieces (many culled from a biographical reminiscence by AR Chisholm in The Haunted Rendezvous):
- After one year (1920) at Melb Uni., Higgins left Australia to continue his studies at Oxford. There he became friends with Roy Campbell and Robert Graves. The former, according to HM Green (A History of Australian Literature 1920-1953) declared Higgins 'the most interesting of all the poets at Oxford'. On his appointment to the chair of English at the University of Cairo during the '30s Graves arranged for Higgins to accompany him as asst lecturer in English. However, Graves didn't take up the appointment, so Higgins's job there fell through too.
- '20/30s. Higgins does much literary reviewing in UK papers and journals. He also becomes the first cinema critic for The Spectator.

- c.1974. Thesis. The Nature of Bertram Higgins' Poetry. Copy in State Lib of NSW.
- 1968-1974. Correspondence between James McAuley and Bertram Higgins. Held in the McAuley collection. State Lib of NSW.


These details are still a mishmash. Bits and pieces. I'm trying to track down Robert J King, and Higgins's children (who are proving difficult to find). Still far too early to put together a coherent survey. Higgins spent the final 30 years of his life in Melbourne. What in the heck was he up to then? Jim Griffin, the historian, ran into him in the Beehive Hotel in Kew sometime during this period, noted what an interesting character he seemed to be, but (being an historian!) didn't pursue this 'literary' figure. That was a missed opportunity.

Cheers, Gerald

oOo


May 3

Kris,

The Selected Poems were published in 1981, almost certainly therefore at the instigation of someone(s) else - maybe Chisholm, or Michael Parer, or one of Higgins's children. At this stage I have no idea how representative of his work this collection is. The poems that I would like to see are those of the '20s, which clearly impressed people such as Campbell and Graves.

The Robert J King I refer to in my previous email is the author of the thesis now held in the SLNSW. I'm also trying to contact Ken Hince. One of Hince's colleagues whilst they were teachers at Xavier (where Higgins also went to school) I know did make contact with Higgins.

Chisholm seems to have been alive at the time (1981) of the publication of the Selected Poems.

Cheers
Gerald

oOo


May 3

Chisholm died in 1981, at 93. He was always interested in contemporary Australian poetry, as you probably know.
His major (publication) interest was in the French Symbolists. Both of these strands would have readily lead him to Higgins.
G



-----------------------------------------------------------------------

JURATE SASNAITIS


Two poems from GRAVELLY VIEWS


*

OM MANE PADME HUNG (repeat)

The sun kissed my cheek

And inspired the chant.



*


ECHO

I am mutable and infinite, I reflect exactly
Whatever it is you want to be. I show you.
My slippery tongue between your words,
I might trip you up, but never myself.
I cannot lie. I do. Lately more and more.
You are pompous and pigheaded, arrogant
And vain. I cannot help you. The truth alternates
---yours and mine---yours and mine---
I am not here to show you up. I am here to plump.
Now I am a cat. My tail twists between your legs,
A tickle up the trousers, and you splutter, utterly charmed
By your own wit and wisdom and superior intellect.
Gosh you're attractive! As if it matters what I think
When you're here to tell me what that is.
I want to please. I do. Most of the time.
I hold you in my eyes and wonder what you see.
It only happened once that someone noticed
My eyes are green. But so were his.


*


------------------------------------------------------------------

LAURIE FERDINANDS


FOUR POEMS

*


Ancestors on show


Bleeding in the corner

A troubled

connection

Met by loathing

And selfish love

A cruel joke


*

Second cremation


His death was

slow

Predictably so

Giving time for her

To run the lines

And find her own

casket


*

Someone to trust


When she's gone

The world will

shrink

And become like a

wallnut

Perhaps trust is

everything

Blood and bones


*

Trotting pages


A clever collection

Full of life

Incinerators and

boys

Lasting years as

Chronicles of fun


*

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

GEORGE LEVENTAKIS


*

Born from the edge of the water
Diving at the end of the stream
Life in the city would mean
just a picture of one world to me
that says something else
Keep me alive dear Sir,
Keep me alive dear Sir
Give me memories of love I hold in my mind
as sacred.
Because just a picture of the one world
to me that says
I'm there
and you're here
is alive.
Keep me alive dear Sir
Keep me alive.


*

-------------------------------------------------------------------


ALBERT TRAJSTMAN

Two poems from TURDUS MERULA SINGING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

*

[from the Introduction : "The title of this collection comes from the first line of a Lennon and McCartney song "Blackbird". It's not that I particularly like the song; it's nice enough. But I am intrigued by the image of a blackbird singing in the dead of night and by the realisation that unless the blackbird is singing no one would know that it existed. these poems are my attempt to acknowledge my own existence.
The technical name for a blackbird is Turdus merula hence the title of this collection.
--Melbourne, 2010.]


oOo

[The Seed: My wife's family had a painting with a life of its own until my wife killed it after her brother had killed himself.]


YOUR FAMILY HEIRLOOM PAINTING

Ah that big brown painting.
Painted by an ancestor.
Painted 150 years ago, or so Ma said.
Big, dark and poorly executed.
Wrongly shaped bodies with pin sized heads.
Bodies in stiff unnatural postures in some bucolic Victorian landscape.
A family legend went with the scene.
The painting even had a name:
"Lord Somers negotiating with brigands in Italy to secure the release of his beloved."
A big, brown ugly painting that seemed to say:
"I've earned my right to be ugly and revered - I've been around for ever."
that painting hung in your bedroom.
It must have witnessed your youthful lust and your experiments.
Seen you when your head was bent at your desk.
Seen you when dozed off at your studies.
Or when you roasted your legs with the blower heater.
The painting moved when you moved.
It even followed you when you married.
Finally in the interest of tasteful decor it went.
You couldn't bring yourself to dispose it for ever more
So you gave it to your brother.
At least it's still in the family you said.
At least it suits his style of home you said.
Exiled, it stayed with him.

It was hanging there the night he did the same.
He had thought you liked it so he left it to you in his will.
The day we cleared his house you took a knife to that painting.
The exhilaration as the knife sliced at the brittle canvas.
The joy of ripping strips just like lifting tops off scabs.
In the end it was easy.
In the end it was just a pile of little brown stiff rags.
In the end it was nothing.


oOo

[The Seed: After 60 years I hunted out the Paris apartment block where I had spent my first three years.]

AN APARTMENT ON RUE DE VINAIGRIERS

In my first three years
I lived in an apartment.
On the Rue de Vinaigriers.
A street linking Boulevard de Magenta to the canal.
Over the years
I believed it was a grand apartment.
Like those in films set in Paris.
A half a dozen decades later I returned.
But it was not what I remembered.
Surely I had never lived in an ugly concrete block.
In my memory my block echoed La belle Epoch.
In my memory my block complimented Haussmann's grand plan.
In my memory my block had charming wrought iron balconies.
Balconies forbidden to any bebe choux lest he should fall.
I didn't remember this featureless building.
Mine could not have been a between-the-wars concrete block
I never gazed out of mean little windows.
In its best years this building could never have been hospitable.
The building across the street was more like the sort
I thought I lived in - typically Parisian.
Surely that was the one - that was my building.
But the block number in notes from impeccable sources
Said: "No".
Mine was the ugly block with the mean windows
And I had spent my first three years gazing at that Parisian beauty opposite.


--------------------------------------------------------------

CLAIRE GASKIN


INFALLIBILITY

writing face down
the only sense is collage

praying for approval in front of a statue
god-mother telling mother to tell you off for idolatry

leave me alone on the page
I can feel the capillaries breaking in my legs
and my pen running out of ink

I am up to my knees in the story of :
we are only doing this because we love you

slashing tyres
cutting poems

when beliefs are more important than people
we are beetles on our backs

children in strollers holding dolls on nooses

prostitution doesn't stop rape
a child holding a bunch of daisies bigger than her face
it exists because of rape

footsteps in the cemetery
I will dye my hair in Autumn
control being a response to loss

a belief you can't be wrong
while the leaves loosen like promises

a belief you can't control your urges
bubble wrap between stacked marble at the masons

both beliefs that you can't
and here in the story up to my hips


------------------------------------------------------------------------


GREGORY DAY


COMPOSTED

I was still laughing from the world's last joke
when the chicken farmer came into the co-op.
I straightened as they strined some nonsense
about oysters pleasing the missus.
Common enough joke in a fish co-op
but that wasn't what disappointed me.
I knew from their downbeaten colonial drawl,
not to mention the younger one's hairlip,
that they weren't your off-the-shelf yobbos
on a lark or a bender, but rather
deeply outcasted, outlasted hicks.

Why should they have to pretend otherwise
in a time that already wished them dead, buried
or at best composted? And with that barbed thought
I heard a keening right there across the counter :
A weird enough gift to right the broken world.

'Have you heard, the chicken farmer's fecund lament
Made of pullets and stink, insignificance, vile roughage
And oh such a relief? A whole town has been healed
From that one frankly extravagant outburst
Sung with an eye turned-in to the heavens
And with sorrow's tears falling out into joy.'

But nup, a fly buzzed, their orders ensued typically.
The hairlip bit and with his downturn of phrase
merely handed me the dosh. It was a fair exchange:
One dozen oysters for a sweet dream short of a quid.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

ED MYCUE


I STAND BY THE ROSE

Viewing and reviewing my stay is an art formed in simple words of surviving, growing old, doing a good job necklaced like the world that can change from one day to the next and hangs on. And I stand by the rose without clean hands although summer is over and passages of melancholy loss recess in dreams that curl like the bannister or a squirrel's tail, squeaking, shivering with possibility for the right moment. all the while dewy mornings, azure skies, pussy willow trees---kit, caboodle of dreams' stocks-in-trade---confront the knife, a tiny blade that conspires like needles, stars, explosions and yet are still not night but light on light: the lake. Between past and future is now, no hands in the stone although breath has many doors to mix retrospect with apprehension, maybe told, forgotten, lost, found this morning.


oOo

TRANSLUCENCE
for Thom Gunn


as we rose, we changed---birthslug, toddler,

kiddo, preteen brainiac out through serious
awkwardness, bootielateral-liciously present

into some normatively developed willfulness
termed 'translucent' 'conduit'---symbols for such

flowering forms transversing to any seedy end.

the who we were and are will swell, seek, range,
swim within the scale our mature notions permit

wading through them conducting translucent lives


oOo

PEACE CORPS SKETCH

I honor the Peace Corps and those who brought it into being.
I honor the dedication of its Volunteers and staff.

Before it began, as a WGBH-TV (then located on the MIT campus) as a lowell fellow (lowell institute for cooperative broadcasting) intern in 1960-61, I met (as switcher/technical assistant director) candidate John Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Harold Stassen, Adlai Stevenson and others who discussed (on Nieman Foundation curator Louis Lyons' thrice weekly 14 minute 25 second shows on WGBH-TV the then New England Television-NET that preceded PBS) its establishment; and also worked on putting together at WGBH-TV the announcement program that aired on all major commercial networks in the Spring 1961 under the direction of the cameraman and director from our station who gone and gotten the footage in Washington, D.C.

Then when the test was given at Harvard yard, I took it. I got and accepted the call to go to U.C.-Berkeley for training for the Ghana 1 contingent (the first of several that went out then); in due course, after meeting the President in the Rose Garden and in his White House Oval Office, we left for Accra from Washington, D.C. in late August 1961 in a two engine prop Convair across the Atlantic stopping for refueling in the Azores, and again in Dakar, Senegal rearing up above the Ocean before coming down over the beaches of Ghana.

So it is with sorrow that I feel the Pace Corps has been dishonored and irrevocably tainted by the Bush and Cheney administration who for a time gathered it into the American military's house. I, after consultation with others, began to compose a draft, a protest. I sent the completed 'draft' to the Poets Against The War protest site:

MOMENTO MORI

today as we look forward now let us say
goodbye to our hopeful good past and not
let it stink and fray along with the misdeeds
we have recently been made party to, for

by including the Peace Corps as a career path
of military service under the guise of
some "national service" rubric, the great
ideas has been fatally compromised, dissembling

the intent in John F. Kennedy's creation
of the Peace Corps by a sneaky reformulation
the substance gone, what's left is a shadow
of a dream now morphed into the nightmare.

the ethical and criminal, even treasonous
contempt toward the American people by the
Bush-Cheyney administration stains even our
history. Peace Corps in practice is now dead.

[Forward email Peace Corps Response / 1111 20th Street NW / Washington, D.C. / 20526]


----------------------------------------------------------------------------


CONTRIBUTORS

GERALD FITZGERALD, ex Classics at Monash University, well-known Proustian, & now for something completely different!
JURATE SASNAITIS, artist, bookseller colleague at the Greville Street Bookshop (Prahran, Victoria). These poems from Gravelly Views (Ratas Editions, February 2010). Her book of prose pieces, Sketches, published by Nosukumo (Melbourne, 1989). Contact, www.gravellyviews.wordpress.com
LAURIE FERDINANDS, Melbourne librarian, previously in Poems & Pieces #1
GEORGE LEVANTAKIS, one of Melbourne's Nicholas Building poets, via Button Mania. Working on a first collection to be published in Greece.
ALBERT TRAJSTMAN, once a mathematician now a poet on Melbourne's spoken word scene, e.g, the Dan, Passionate Tongues.
CLAIRE GASKIN, Melbourne writer & writing teacher around town. Anthologised in the Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, & Motherlode (both 2009). Previously in Poems & Pieces #6
GREGORY DAY's two novels with Picador are Patron Saint of Eels (2005), Ron McCoy'sSea of Diamonds (2007). Various limited edition books with his Merrijig Word & Sound Company, including Where Darkness Never Seeps : Poems of the CBD (featuring M Farrell, C Grierson, K Hemensley, A Stewart, J Taylor) (1999). Previously in Poems & Pieces #3
ED MYCUE lives in San Francisco. Seventeen collections of poetry, most recently Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (Philo Press, 2008). Longstanding Australian (via K Hemensley's H/EAR, W Billeter's Paper Castle) & English (via B Hemensley's Stingy Artist, & P Green's Spectacular Diseases) connections. Aka, The Chronicler. Previously in Poems & Pieces #13

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--A couple of months in the gathering, finally done this day, 9th May, 2010

THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #3, June/July,2008

C. D. BARRON

THE EMPTY SEA

"A red Daedalion on the timid Earth"
Al Aaraaf; E A Poe

As you are outside to my necessary ark
and yet inciteful - time being what it is
We eat stars and look north you say
as if Hesperus bothered us no more
though I the egg and tomb of it all
am unlikely to move that way or this

Uraniborg - you set yourself up
gilded - and it's your move now!


[7 February, 2004]


*

LIGHTENING

"all things as they were"
Lucretius

He gathers twigs
to ponder haystacks
like beehives in grey fields

His book is one of pine needles
threaded with the sentiment
of moths set free

The lichen on his branch
is a sign to place
where crust and core are one

[2008]


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


ASHLEY CAPES


birthday

dust quickens
like spice
in the mouth, lace
curtains
preen
and the forest of millimetres
between us
grows


*

eastern avenue

moon's hangover
hits the street in a splash of white,
outside the window
the transformer
is like a gargoyle, sitting
halfway up the electricity pole,
either too old
or too lazy to climb higher.


*

indian ocean

at scarborough beach
crows bark all morning
and gulls
fill car parks, like
beggars pecking for coins.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


EDDIE CREANEY


EPITAPHS


The banker

Here lies a bank manager
Who lost interest


The politician

Here lies a politician
Lying still


The train driver

Here lies a train driver
Among the other sleepers


The bookkeeper

Here lies a bookkeeper
Entered in the books of the lord


Joseph Smith

Of Mormon fame lies Joseph Smith
Progenitor of kin & kith


Shakespeare

Shakespeare lies beneath this sod
Poetry was his only god


John Milton

Here lies John Milton who told of his blindness
His other works were short on kindness


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



GREGORY DAY


IN COUNTRY VICTORIA
for Peter Temple


Just like another powerless person in polar fleece
living outside the zone of influence and legitimate thought
taking over from nature, the characters of the weather,
applying the lessons as idiomatic law onto current events
rather than skulling the menu in a team-suburb;
it's a type of new pastorale, a wind's free field
refilched, thinking through bends in a clear stream
with, it has to be said, a romance that visitors will arrive.
But it's so invisible, as numerous and hidden as circuit boards:
take the freeway exit ramp, drive east, cross the railway
and follow the cypress wind breaks till the grey letterbox
like in crime fiction, because the independence is criminal,
being innocent is sneaky, and critical's just another rainy day.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


RAE DESMOND JONES


RIMBAUD AT FOURTEEN
(to Liam Frost)


In front of the overhead projector's
Prophetic spidery lines
He precisely pronounced each syllable,
Controlled each pause, released each small word
Like a bird from a cage.

After the applause he sat
With a flick of hair at his pituitary
Smouldered & surveyed the future,
Whining like a helicopter
Just below the bare white ceiling.

Then, when the third eye
Burst into flame,

He skipped down the stairs with his mother
Into the damp garden.

There the shivering palm trees
Whispered sweet promises
& prophecies of savage Africa.


*


The beautiful young woman beside you glances back, into the past, into the tunnel. She turns and smiles. She would like to stop and make love beside the slow moving river past which you are now driving smoothly, but she knows that you must continue the quest. You are a man in search. Despite her eyes and the movement of her taut body, you ignore your growing erection. She sighs deeply, perhaps one of those soft light orgasms with which women express at once their love and disillusionment. The world is full of sparks and fire. The police sirens shriek from the distance but the city waits, wallowing in a future that is already gone.

Violence is deeply disturbing and stimulates you, despite your knowledge of the technological artifice in this ballet of our time. Cars and helicopters writhe in the flames. What use is metal, except as a metaphor for the heart or the body?

The road is limitless. It carries on, beyond the borders of the city, the badlands. The deserts are left behind, congealed into the dark spaces of mass and time of the last frontiers. She goes down on you. Despite the delicious sensations of her tongue around the button of your prick, you continue to hold the wheel firmly. The Ferrari shudders when at last you approach the forked lightning playing on the round hill and the sulphurous mango coloured light.

There is absolutely nothing to it, nothing at all.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


EUGENIO MONTALE, translated by ANDREW TAYLOR


GODISE IL VENTO


Be happy if the wind in the orchard
floods you again with life:
here where a dead tangle
of memories lies buried,
this wasn't a garden, it was a reliquary.
The whirring you hear isn't of wings
but a stirring within the eternal womb:
look how this solitary stretch of land
is turning into a crucible.
A blaze rages here against the sheer wall.
If you keep going maybe you'll encounter
the phantom that will save you;
this is where those acts and histories are composed
that are cancelled as the future is played out.
look for a broken thread in the net,
that binds us, leap through, run for it!
Go! that's my prayer for you - my thirst
will be lightened then, my bitterness less sharp.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

C.D. BARRON lives in the Mountains outside of Melbourne where she continues her studies in the Mysteries.
ASHLEY CAPES co-founded Egg (Poetry) in 2002, which sadly ceased publication in 2006, He is currently studying Arts & Education at Monash, while co-editing the literary web-site www.holland1945.net.au His first collection of poetry, pollen and the storm, 2008, published with the assistance of Small Change Press (Queensland).
EDDIE CREANY lives in Melbourne. Long-standing servant of local poetry organizations. Delivered his Epitaphs at the June reading at the Eco-House in St Kilda (where your editor snapped them up).
GREGORY DAY is a writer, poet & musician living on the southwest coast of Victoria. His latest novel, Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds (Picador, '07) was shortlisted for this year's NSW Premier's Prize for fiction.
RAE DESMOND JONES is a much published poet, short-story writer & novelist of the 70s, 80s, & 90s. Edited the little mag, Your Friendly Fascist. After an extended period as a literary enfant terrible, he paddled through a dour but eventful middle age as a Councillor & Mayor for Ashfield, an inner-Western municipality of Sydney. He has since decided to return to his original calling. There are a few more years of fun beckoning yet, as an old fart terrible. He can be disabused on raedeejay@optusnet.com.au
ANDREW TAYLOR's Collected Poems were published by Salt Publications (UK) in 2004. In that year, during a Residency at the BR Whiting Library in Rome, courtesy of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, he translated a number of Eugenio Montale's poems, which have been broadcast on Mike Ladd's ABC radio programme, Poetica. Teaches at Edith Cowan University, WA.


____________________________________________________________________