Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Compound Eye

By Louise Oxley, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 2003, 32 pages, paperback, $9.95. Reviewed by Andrew Johnson in the April 2004 issue.

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The New Poets series from Five Islands Press has, with the addition of this group of six, now put fifty-four Australian poets into print. The 'new' of the series title might suggest to some that the poets presented are young, and if not previously unpublished at least relatively unknown in print. Neither of these assumptions is correct. All of the poets have appeared, frequently, in print in a variety of Australian and international journals, magazines and daily papers, and while it is irrelevant as a category for judging the merit of the poetry, or much else for that matter, it might also be noted that none of these poets are exactly young -- two of the poets are in their thirties, two in their forties, and two in their fifties.

What is 'new' about these poets, then, is only that none have previously published their work in an individual volume. The series gives these poets their first opportunity to move beyond the limitations of 'occasional' publishing, the placing of single poems or small groups of poems in collections with other poets and writers. While at 32 pages each none of the books could be called expansive, each book is worthy of closer attention on its own terms. That said, the moments of intersection and overlap between two or three poets, here and there, if not among the group as a whole, also merit attention -- if there is such a thing as an Australian poetry, it lurks in these moments.

One point of commonality, the fact that five of the six books are by women, is probably more obvious than it is significant. The effect may be most pronounced in the kind of topics and themes addressed by the poets, but these are probably more strongly influenced by background and experience than by gender. The relationship between child and parent, from the latter's perspective, for instance, is the subject of poems by Ross Donlon, as well as by Jan Teagle Kapetas, Tric O'Heare and Louise Oxley, but not Alicia Sometimes or Helen Lambert. The way this topic is addressed, of course, varies considerably and it might be true that only a man and father would write a poem like 'the good father and his daughter kiss' (Tightrope Horizon, p. 15) or only a woman and mother would write 'Bearing a Name' (Compound Eye, p. 27), a poem about a traumatic birth. It does not follow from this, however, that only a man or a woman could write either poem. What the two poems and the two poets have in common, then, and what links them with the other four poets as well, is a concern with lived experience. But no matter whether the poets relate experiences that are traumatic, extreme, poignant, personal, everyday, humorous, or historical the six poets share a particular mode of addressing experience: the anecdote.

This is to say nothing surprising given that in the last fifty or hundred years, perhaps longer, the vast bulk of poetry in English has been anecdotal in a broad sense. In other words, much modern poetry has related the secret or unpublished stories, the little details that hide in the background of bigger, more widely known narratives. Thus, anecdote touches confession as well as biography and history. The opening lines of Louise Oxley's 'Lagging Behind' and Alicia Sometimes' 'AJ Weberman and the Trashcan' indicate, respectively, the two poles of the mode:

Fumbling in the tartan lining of my old coat,
for the armhole, settling the calm oilskin of the hood,
I see my mother's brief profile before she turns
back toward herself in the mirror,
pressing her lips to spread the lipstick.
(Compound Eye, p. 32)

in 1971
on MacDougal Street
New York
a 25 year old man
unkempt with wispy hair
shouted out the front
of Bob Dylan's house:

FREE BOB DYLAN!
(Kissing the Curve, p. 23)

With a few exceptions, most of the poems in these six books fall somewhere between these two extremes. This applies, interestingly, to the form as well as the manner of the poems. Tric O'Heare's villanelle, 'Tender Hammers', Kapetas' Mallarm�an exercise, 'City without meaning', Donlon's comic play on automated phone menu's and consumer surveys, and two prose poems (Lambert and Sometimes) aside, the poems are brief, free-verse lyrics, most of them shorter than a page and with irregular line lengths.

The major distinctions between the poets, then, are to be found in register, tone and points of reference. In these terms, Donlon and Sometimes can be distinguished in that they write mostly in the vernacular, and take a lighter, comic glance at contemporary Australian culture--the suburbs and popular tourist landmarks, sport and popular music, cars and film. The two share a background in performance, or spoken poetry that may explain this focus, but may also explain some of the weaker parts of the work. A poem like Donlon's 'Gold', (p. 20) for instance, which plays on the media response to the Sydney Olympics ('Amazing, fantastic, unbelievable') lacks the currency it might have had four years ago, but may also need the immediacy and illusion of spontaneity an audience can generate. Sometimes and Donlon also use changes of font, bold text, and non-standard punctuation and capitalisation to give lines the feel and emphasis of speech, but to less effect.

Jan Teagle Kapetas' Flight shares Donlon and Sometimes' interest in the contemporary, but takes on heavier material such as deaths in custody and the treatment of refugees. At a deeper level, Kapetas' interest is in loss and grief, in coming to terms with trauma and injustice (of the universe, if not of human institutions). In one poem about a still-birth 'Ta Oniera Tis Mitera' (pp. 12--14) it is suggested that the experience is beyond language, or that it pushes those who live through it to a place beyond language. The inherent tension that this realisation should produce for a poet, between the compulsion and necessity of speech and the impossibility of communication, is not as apparent in Kapetas' work as it could be. For the most part, the problem her poems reveal is not that some experiences are beyond language, but that it can be all too easy to reduce the extra-ordinary to facile words.

In this respect the erotic, intimate poetry of Helen Lambert's Venus Steps Out provides a striking contrast with Kapetas. The power of Lambert's poems comes not from the extreme nature of the experiences she relates, but from understatement and inference -- an ability to trace the unsaid, the unsayable, without disturbing it. The economy of the poem 'Honeymoon' is a particularly fine example. It is a blackly comic tale of a man who dies 'on the job' and is carried out of his hotel 'crouched/ like an Egyptian figurine', in full rigour. The final lines compress multiple meanings and invite second and third readings: 'in their rented room his mistress/ sipped milk with the home-help nurse / who said / nice honeymoon / and meant it.' (p. 7)

With their interest in environment, the natural world, place and history, Louise Oxley's Compound Eye and Tric O'heare's Tender Hammers are, in many ways, the most recognisably Australian books in this series. O'Heare's poems touch on the nexus between religion and nationality, specifically Irish-Catholicism, central in the formation of the Australian identity. The aim in poems such as 'Madonna of the Dry-Country' and the 'The Judas Papers' is to re-place ancient religious stories and themes in a contemporary language and setting, but in poems like 'Catholic Butcher's shop' and 'Dark Halls of Faith' it is to question the place of the religion in her own life and the lives of those around her. Louise Oxley, by way of contrast, is less concerned with the influence of religion and culture as with the relationship between individuals and the plants and animals, land, light and weather around them. Like Helen Lambert, however, it is her direct and unaffected manner that will keep her lines in the memory of readers.

Citation

Andrew Johnson. 'Review: Compound Eye by Louise Oxley' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), April 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

'Louise Oxley's poems are insightful meditations on the natural world, and how we interact with it. Her craft has been forged from years of pure observation and a layering of the rhythms of the body and the head into marvellous music'. - Anthony Lawrence

'In Compound Eye Louise Oxley undergoes a moving personal search through word, image and line to find the essential shape and texture of her experience and understanding. Not only does she succeed in giving her work an elegant, graceful cast, but she also brings the reader into that search, allowing them to apprehend the enlargements that occur when language and sensibility are so deftly connected.

Have You Also Read?

Liberating Tokyo

Katarina Konkoly, Wollongong: Five Islands Press, 2004, 32 Pages, Paperback, $9.95
Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the April 2005 issue.

The title suggests that Konkoly may be attempting to free us from constrictive urban paradigms -- to depict and reframe the metropolis -- transforming our existence and our sensibilities. The sassy superhero girl on the cover, a liberating force, looks like she is going to enact this for us. However, it is misleading. Like the feline, East Asian eyes that loom behind the young girl, dominating and appropriating her persona, we do not get what we might expect. Hints of city life do adorn the collection, and the 'Tokyo girl' appears in the first poem, but its themes are rooted in a more mature sensibility and sexuality. The collection is temporally structured. We progress through time, in ... read more.

NRB April 2004

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