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

Musing on chaos: Two books of poetry

Reviewed by Bev Braune

Around Here, by Cath Kenneally, Wakefield Press, 1999, pb., $16.95

This collection of thoughts on the “post-feminist” woman in suburbia reads in the vein of Virginia Woolf 's essays or letters; Kenneally's movements, antithetical, confessional. Her words do not strive, it seems to me, for empathy; rather to make themselves heard as statements of analysis, to the point that their form in poetry often seems arbitrary. In acrimonious tones underscored by the stance of the woman “bereft” of emotional and maternal support, Kenneally assesses the lot of the educated mother now in her 40s who seems to have few tools to counter the difficulties of everyday experience. She rejects an education lauding male icons, and much of the 1970s feminism that creates this “mother” as victim.

Kenneally treats such a woman's liberal education as a distraction or detour from her main destination: recognising herself as a “woman”. “Let Wystan Hugh and Tommy Stearns/ rest in their respective urns/ … /bring on Aphra, roll out Shelley/ (Mary, this time), Masters, Jolley/Let's have Ursula, Doris, Djuna/ Sod your 'later', make it sooner” (“Battle Hymn for Dale”). For this woman, “nostalgia is something/ incapacitating, like/ rheumatic fever/ must have/ been/ it weakens the heart” (“Don't Look Down”).

In response, Around Here offers an alternative world, yet one based, ironically enough, conservative Catholicism. The volume turns with a spark of hope to the enigmatic images of those who seek serenity in days of meditation, the nuns of Kenneally's Catholic schooldays, their comprehension of vulnerability, their undeterred focus.

Perhaps, like Andrea Dworkin, Kenneally is advocating a “Womanland” where “women have their own country”, as Linda Grant wrote, in an interview with Dworkin for the British The Guardian, about her new book on Jewish women, Scapegoat: Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation. In Womanland, women might calmly muse on the meaning of chaos. Maybe, women drowning in suburbia might see their way clear to their own woman-lands rather than thrash against an autocracy burying them beneath its crumbling walls. Here, I imagine, there might be self-government, erudition through choice of one's syllabus, enlightenment, a career goal. I should like to read more of Kenneally's nuns, of her lit world of women who do not hanker after nail-polish or a home of their own: “It's the living nuns who haunt me” (“Around here”).

Rogue Equations by Wendy Jenkins, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000, pb, $18.25

Almost filmic, Jenkins' equations pulsate light and dark, beating towards a comprehension of natural purposes. The shuddering of hard-packed ice, of echoes riding the air are presented as ciphers of a simple design. They are manipulated as metaphors of breath, proof of what we don't see or don't want to hear. Jenkins writes of the wanderer in us, in the true sense of the word, without destinations in mind save that clarity of thought: the clarity of the remembered image that becomes metaphor for a way of being.

In the room the women come and go
T S Eliot doesn't know.
It's a fine line we are walking
this has never been such a sudden place
(“So”)

It was T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets, in particular “Little Gidding”, more than “The Waste Land” (to which Jenkins alludes in “So”) that came to mind as I read Rogue Equations. Divided into five sub-sections, the opening stanza of “Little Gidding” gives us:

The brief sun flames the ice
on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat…
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

And its closing stanza brings us to that Remarkable rose as a “crowned knot of fire”. But there is no single archetypal place that Jenkins is interested in here. Her goal seems to be to understand the individual petals of Eliot's rose.

Her exploration in the poetic voice of the first four of the collection's five sections is beautifully shaped and arresting. However, her tight and original expressions occasionally share the same seat with cliches that tend to diminish the impact of the whole image:

the clouds have dropped
and toughened up…
I cannot think it
past my knees
so resistive so adaptive
it takes my breath away
(“IV”)

It is here that she begins serious interrogation of relationships between the reality of dream, the nature of elemental change and the fiction of photography.

Her places of discovery are questions spread with photographs of layers of oneself, as if they were a “wicked pack of cards” (making active the muffled clairvoyance of Eliot's Madame Sosostris). It is not so much a homecoming to desire for transformation as to one of safety, albeit with windows to the unknown, to make sense of the frames of her woman's body as a real element, the most meaningful cipher - the spread of cards of Hollow Women.

Bev Braune is a poet and writer who lives in Sydney

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

Musing on chaos: Two books of poetry Reviewed by Bev Braune Around Here, by Cath Kenneally, Wakefield Press, 1999, pb., $16.95 This collection of thoughts on the “post-feminist” woman in suburbia reads in the vein of Virginia Woolf 's essays or letters; Kenneally's movements, antithetical, confessional. Her words do not strive, it seems to me, for empathy; rather to make themselves heard as statements of analysis, to the point that their form in poetry often seems arbitrary. In acrimonious tones underscored by the stance of the woman “bereft” of emotional and maternal support, Kenneally assesses the lot of the educated mother now in her 40s who seems to have few tools to counter the difficulties of everyday experience. She rejects an education lauding male icons, and much of the 1970s feminism that creates this “mother” as victim. Kenneally treats such a woman's liberal education as a distraction or detour from her main destination: recognising herself as a “woman”. “Let Wystan Hugh and Tommy Stearns/ rest in their respective urns/ … /bring on Aphra, roll out Shelley/ (Mary, this time), Masters, Jolley/Let's have Ursula, Doris, Djuna/ Sod your 'later', make it sooner” (“Battle Hymn for Dale”). For this woman, “nostalgia is something/ incapacitating, like/ rheumatic fever/ must have/ been/ it weakens the heart” (“Don't Look Down”). In response, Around Here offers an alternative world, yet one based, ironically enough, conservative Catholicism. The volume turns with a spark of hope to the enigmatic images of those who seek serenity in days of meditation, the nuns of Kenneally's Catholic schooldays, their comprehension of vulnerability, their undeterred focus. Perhaps, like Andrea Dworkin, Kenneally is advocating a “Womanland” where “women have their own country”, as Linda Grant wrote, in an interview with Dworkin for the British The Guardian, about her new book on Jewish women, Scapegoat: Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation. In Womanland, women might calmly muse on the meaning of chaos. Maybe, women drowning in suburbia might see their way clear to their own woman-lands rather than thrash against an autocracy burying them beneath its crumbling walls. Here, I imagine, there might be self-government, erudition through choice of one's syllabus, enlightenment, a career goal. I should like to read more of Kenneally's nuns, of her lit world of women who do not hanker after nail-polish or a home of their own: “It's the living nuns who haunt me” (“Around here”). Rogue Equations by Wendy Jenkins, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000, pb, $18.25 Almost filmic, Jenkins' equations pulsate light and dark, beating towards a comprehension of natural purposes. The shuddering of hard-packed ice, of echoes riding the air are presented as ciphers of a simple design. They are manipulated as metaphors of breath, proof of what we don't see or don't want to hear. Jenkins writes of the wanderer in us, in the true sense of the word, without destinations in mind save that clarity of thought: the clarity of the remembered image that becomes metaphor for a way of being. In the room the women come and go T S Eliot doesn't know. It's a fine line we are walking this has never been such a sudden place (“So”) It was T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets, in particular “Little Gidding”, more than “The Waste Land” (to which Jenkins alludes in “So”) that came to mind as I read Rogue Equations. Divided into five sub-sections, the opening stanza of “Little Gidding” gives us: The brief sun flames the ice on pond and ditches, In windless cold that is the heart's heat… Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer? And its closing stanza brings us to that Remarkable rose as a “crowned knot of fire”. But there is no single archetypal place that Jenkins is interested in here. Her goal seems to be to understand the individual petals of Eliot's rose. Her exploration in the poetic voice of the first four of the collection's five sections is beautifully shaped and arresting. However, her tight and original expressions occasionally share the same seat with cliches that tend to diminish the impact of the whole image: the clouds have dropped and toughened up… I cannot think it past my knees so resistive so adaptive it takes my breath away (“IV”) It is here that she begins serious interrogation of relationships between the reality of dream, the nature of elemental change and the fiction of photography. Her places of discovery are questions spread with photographs of layers of oneself, as if they were a “wicked pack of cards” (making active the muffled clairvoyance of Eliot's Madame Sosostris). It is not so much a homecoming to desire for transformation as to one of safety, albeit with windows to the unknown, to make sense of the frames of her woman's body as a real element, the most meaningful cipher - the spread of cards of Hollow Women. Bev Braune is a poet and writer who lives in Sydney