Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Four poetry collections

Reviewed by Jeltje Fanoy

One of Many/poems from prison by Brenda Hodge, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000, pb., $16.95

Poetry as a form of self-expression, when all other avenues may be closed … this kind of poetry is poignantly presented in Brenda Hodge's poems about prison life. These poems were often written in solitary confinement: “Lockdown. Doors slam. / Keys rattle. / Footsteps fade. / Silence. / Alone and looking/at a blank page, / I light a smoke.” (from “Cell-ramps”). But these poems are not just about solitary confinement. They actually give a brilliant picture of times spent together inside, where perhaps Summer Issue and Mother's Day stand out in terms of starkness and precision of language. Some very moving portraits emerge, of emerging friendships and friends visiting each other in spite of impossible living conditions outside.

I was particularly moved by the poems about Marlene: “Only last week you were in intensive care, / close to death, for the third time this year. / But still you've come to visit me” (from “A Special Visit”). But so many of these poems are overwhelming in their directness and lack of sentimentality! How can I forget “O mouth”, about a tiny women with the gift of the gab, a real fighter with words! When she's back in: “this time her mouth/turned inside out: / a splattered plum/satsuma blue”.

Brenda has also included some biographical poems in this volume, mainly about her childhood which was very grim. These poems are often accompanied by imagery from long hours spent looking at four walls: ”A blowfly in my cell/is trapped/splitting the silence/ping-ponging/off the white walls” (“On the Edge”). No longer detained herself, she comments in her last poem on the chances for survival of others still inside. Prisoners may now have civil rights, and a right to education, but there's a new crime-wave, and many people now demand longer sentences for offenders: “a crime wave never seen before: / it is a social war”. (from “What Price?”).

I was reminded of the current mandatory sentencing laws which, at the date of writing this, are still in place in W.A. and the N.T.

Hijacked to the Underworld, by Carolyn Gerrish, Five Islands Press, 2000, $14.95

Some of the poems in this volume are also connected to prison-life, because the poet has a day-job there teaching creative writing. Carolyn Gerrish's work as a teacher in creative writing gives her a special affinity with those “in the real world … where nothing is contrived & sense prevails” (from “Aftermath”).

Carolyn Gerrish now lives in Sydney, but once she lived in Cessnock, and some of her poetry in this volume also provides us with a contrast between those two existences. This is a past left behind revisited only when she visits her ageing parents: “& your father/holding his face/guilty he's not immortal/& your mother/supporting her head/as if it might disappear/with the washing up water” (from “Generation”). This was an existence where “you move/ unaccompanied….over the black holes/to a destination with yourself” (from “Arriva”).

In some of her poems Carolyn moves quite effortlessly between her and her mother's world. Sometimes she's not sure whether her perceptions may not be coloured by a “mid-life autism”, where she wants “all the sadness of her life/to flow down the wall/I had built to stop myself feeling” (from “Tenebrae”). I particularly liked her poem about her mother in palliative care. “Don't worry about me” says her mother, “& she disappeared on an ocean of morphine. never wanting to cause any trouble. a good girl to the end”. (from “Elkington Par”).

In this 21^st century the poet muses about the “Death of the Author” in post-modernist imagery. She also worries about her situation in the “Palace of Efficiency/where all literature/has been restructured” (from “Arrested Mus”). There's a sense of amnesia about this new re-structured world where all you can do is lie about in the park, “convalescing from life”. Words will not form anymore. The word has become “part of a newspaper where the article you want has been cut out by somebody else” (from “Elkington Park”).

Each Clear Night, by Marcella Polain, Five Island Press, 2000, $14.95

In this, her second volume of poetry, Marcella Polain shows an ability to almost acrobatically move about the page between great contrasts of emotion. These are larger-than-life experiences, sometimes punctuated with references to Greek gods and goddesses. We are confronted also with extremes in climate and landscape which seem to erupt almost spontaneously. The Australian landscape is often represented as a place of natural calamities: “last night/in sleep/i saw the fitzroy river/the brown scour of drowning/where the wet rushed in/over our heads while we slept/& took everything” (from “kimberley poem two”).

In the background there is the constant pain felt in response to the genocide experienced by her family in the lost homeland. In her dreams she is tortured again and again by violent images which are experienced in terms of her own body: “her bones sing/all their percussive history/every night/their dumb atoms frantic” (from “ferocious speleology”).

A kind of Utopia is expressed in poems about early, hesitant sexual encounters. Also in sudden lyrical passages of almost existential bliss: “forgive me/I have nothing for you/but…to grow old/to meet in large & distant cities/to walk arm in arm in gardens/in the sun” (from “carnations”).

Marcella Polain is currently writing a poetic narrative about her people's survival of the Armenian genocide, and the poems in Each Clear Night could well be seen as a kind of prelude to this work in progress. They also bear testimony to a great passion for life, always ready to burst out at the seams of conventional thinking: “all that promise ballooning/the long tough horizon/ruptures (us) quick as hindenberg/this must be amnesia/potent as a pin/& the night's raw air” (from “this democracy”).

Adagio for the Dead by Rose Revere, Ginninderra Press, 2000, pb., $14.00

Adagio for the Dead, a series of short stories by Rose Revere about disappointed love in marriage, and about the children of such marriages, has overtones of the sort of moralistic literature I was introduced to as a teenager in Sunday-School. Some of the underlying assumptions seem to be that abusive mothers have, by definition, abusive daughters; that abortions are sought for “selfish” reasons (in this case, by a gay husband); that money corrupts young people in spite of selfless, hardworking parents. It's actually quite a bleak little book, where salvation only comes because of the near-death of a very young child.

I hope that other women may find more comfort in these stories. The logo of this press suggests it's a Christian publication. I myself didn't feel uplifted by any of these stories, but then the title, in all fairness, had not promised such transcendence. They are simply described by Ginninderra Press as “four sharply observed stories about fear, betrayal and loss”.

Jeltje Fanoy is a Melbourne poet.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Four poetry collections Reviewed by Jeltje Fanoy One of Many/poems from prison by Brenda Hodge, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000, pb., $16.95 Poetry as a form of self-expression, when all other avenues may be closed … this kind of poetry is poignantly presented in Brenda Hodge's poems about prison life. These poems were often written in solitary confinement: “Lockdown. Doors slam. / Keys rattle. / Footsteps fade. / Silence. / Alone and looking/at a blank page, / I light a smoke.” (from “Cell-ramps”). But these poems are not just about solitary confinement. They actually give a brilliant picture of times spent together inside, where perhaps Summer Issue and Mother's Day stand out in terms of starkness and precision of language. Some very moving portraits emerge, of emerging friendships and friends visiting each other in spite of impossible living conditions outside. I was particularly moved by the poems about Marlene: “Only last week you were in intensive care, / close to death, for the third time this year. / But still you've come to visit me” (from “A Special Visit”). But so many of these poems are overwhelming in their directness and lack of sentimentality! How can I forget “O mouth”, about a tiny women with the gift of the gab, a real fighter with words! When she's back in: “this time her mouth/turned inside out: / a splattered plum/satsuma blue”. Brenda has also included some biographical poems in this volume, mainly about her childhood which was very grim. These poems are often accompanied by imagery from long hours spent looking at four walls: ”A blowfly in my cell/is trapped/splitting the silence/ping-ponging/off the white walls” (“On the Edge”). No longer detained herself, she comments in her last poem on the chances for survival of others still inside. Prisoners may now have civil rights, and a right to education, but there's a new crime-wave, and many people now demand longer sentences for offenders: “a crime wave never seen before: / it is a social war”. (from “What Price?”). I was reminded of the current mandatory sentencing laws which, at the date of writing this, are still in place in W.A. and the N.T. Hijacked to the Underworld, by Carolyn Gerrish, Five Islands Press, 2000, $14.95 Some of the poems in this volume are also connected to prison-life, because the poet has a day-job there teaching creative writing. Carolyn Gerrish's work as a teacher in creative writing gives her a special affinity with those “in the real world … where nothing is contrived & sense prevails” (from “Aftermath”). Carolyn Gerrish now lives in Sydney, but once she lived in Cessnock, and some of her poetry in this volume also provides us with a contrast between those two existences. This is a past left behind revisited only when she visits her ageing parents: “& your father/holding his face/guilty he's not immortal/& your mother/supporting her head/as if it might disappear/with the washing up water” (from “Generation”). This was an existence where “you move/ unaccompanied….over the black holes/to a destination with yourself” (from “Arriva”). In some of her poems Carolyn moves quite effortlessly between her and her mother's world. Sometimes she's not sure whether her perceptions may not be coloured by a “mid-life autism”, where she wants “all the sadness of her life/to flow down the wall/I had built to stop myself feeling” (from “Tenebrae”). I particularly liked her poem about her mother in palliative care. “Don't worry about me” says her mother, “& she disappeared on an ocean of morphine. never wanting to cause any trouble. a good girl to the end”. (from “Elkington Par”). In this 21^st century the poet muses about the “Death of the Author” in post-modernist imagery. She also worries about her situation in the “Palace of Efficiency/where all literature/has been restructured” (from “Arrested Mus”). There's a sense of amnesia about this new re-structured world where all you can do is lie about in the park, “convalescing from life”. Words will not form anymore. The word has become “part of a newspaper where the article you want has been cut out by somebody else” (from “Elkington Park”). Each Clear Night, by Marcella Polain, Five Island Press, 2000, $14.95 In this, her second volume of poetry, Marcella Polain shows an ability to almost acrobatically move about the page between great contrasts of emotion. These are larger-than-life experiences, sometimes punctuated with references to Greek gods and goddesses. We are confronted also with extremes in climate and landscape which seem to erupt almost spontaneously. The Australian landscape is often represented as a place of natural calamities: “last night/in sleep/i saw the fitzroy river/the brown scour of drowning/where the wet rushed in/over our heads while we slept/& took everything” (from “kimberley poem two”). In the background there is the constant pain felt in response to the genocide experienced by her family in the lost homeland. In her dreams she is tortured again and again by violent images which are experienced in terms of her own body: “her bones sing/all their percussive history/every night/their dumb atoms frantic” (from “ferocious speleology”). A kind of Utopia is expressed in poems about early, hesitant sexual encounters. Also in sudden lyrical passages of almost existential bliss: “forgive me/I have nothing for you/but…to grow old/to meet in large & distant cities/to walk arm in arm in gardens/in the sun” (from “carnations”). Marcella Polain is currently writing a poetic narrative about her people's survival of the Armenian genocide, and the poems in Each Clear Night could well be seen as a kind of prelude to this work in progress. They also bear testimony to a great passion for life, always ready to burst out at the seams of conventional thinking: “all that promise ballooning/the long tough horizon/ruptures (us) quick as hindenberg/this must be amnesia/potent as a pin/& the night's raw air” (from “this democracy”). Adagio for the Dead by Rose Revere, Ginninderra Press, 2000, pb., $14.00 Adagio for the Dead, a series of short stories by Rose Revere about disappointed love in marriage, and about the children of such marriages, has overtones of the sort of moralistic literature I was introduced to as a teenager in Sunday-School. Some of the underlying assumptions seem to be that abusive mothers have, by definition, abusive daughters; that abortions are sought for “selfish” reasons (in this case, by a gay husband); that money corrupts young people in spite of selfless, hardworking parents. It's actually quite a bleak little book, where salvation only comes because of the near-death of a very young child. I hope that other women may find more comfort in these stories. The logo of this press suggests it's a Christian publication. I myself didn't feel uplifted by any of these stories, but then the title, in all fairness, had not promised such transcendence. They are simply described by Ginninderra Press as “four sharply observed stories about fear, betrayal and loss”. Jeltje Fanoy is a Melbourne poet.