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The Kindly Ones

By Susan Hampton, Carlton: Five Islands Press, 2005, 96 pages, paperback, $18.95. Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the July 2006 issue.

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'inside life so vast

Artful, and fey. The first poem and its opening lines are dutifully poetic, but once she's cleared her throat, she presents a fresh, clear voice:

The Bright Road as far as I know
is in eastern Victoria, and for some
reason the country there is good to look at...

The vast erasures of the self
contain... -- I hesitate to call it a god --
('On the Bright Road')

Hampton is an open-minded writer, with the uncertainties and hesitations of the true seeker.

There are many terrific hits throughout this collection. Her theme is: 'The inner world is all around us'. She explores the ways in which the outer and the inner life interact, and she seeks to understand the external world by seeing how it resonates with the internal: 'is it possible to talk to / your soul -- will it talk back?' ('Iron').

Hampton does not restrict her explorations to the instinctive. She also examines how the spiritual connects with the artistic:

I can't get near Jesus
except through Mozart...
in the Bach mass in B minor, the way he puts
the note a bit sooner, or a bit later
than you expect: is that not godly
('Necropolis Avenue')

Literary and philosophical authorities are freely referred to: 'I look up entraves: shackles' ('Iron'). Further, she elucidates the effect of books and authors on the real, social world (the 'real world, so-called'):

After his mammoth histories of the two world wars,
there was no reclosing the cupboard door.
This superbly produced volume asks who
can penetrate to the real man, ...
gorgeous and engorged volumes
('Varieties of Crab')

And vice versa:

Shakespeare wrote eleven plays
in the five years following the plague.

If you were prevaricating about your art
perhaps the best thing is a pile of bodies
in the cart...
('Chit not chat')

The autobiographical pieces read well but when narrative takes over for too long the poems are less successful/interesting.

She is interested in female lineages -- Robert Graves' White Goddess, 'Demeter, corn mother // before that, the mare-headed goddess... Colleges of priestesses' ('Mare-Headed') -- but she goes well beyond a minority mythologising its sexuality.

The second half of the collection is a narrative poem called The Kindly Ones. It flips back and forth between the depths of literature and a Sydney call centre, between core mythologies and the sex worker trade, between formative human culture and rural fairs:

We went into the halls of time,
Cobwebbed tunnels where dank plants loomed,
Past the river-caves' tacky monsters
Whose ancestors' claws we've pulled from our backs,
Then above-ground we saw a sign for the Bush Races.
(p 55)

The Eumenides have moved from their cave to 'a four-bunk room / in the hostel'. Here, the Furies, 'practised in dissonance... goddesses of punishment', learn mercy. The Kindly Ones is about how myths are altered:

The story, gutted of its fury, assimilated, civilised,
provides bel canto singing at its finest... both versions
are good... the perhaps satisfying banality
of the happy ending...
I don't know whether I believe it. The real meaning covered
with the bearable meaning, which is also true
(pp 65-6)

But different versions are one another.

Yet, where is emotion in all this? Glibness sometimes fills in for deep emotion, and when it finally forces its way to the surface, it shocks: 'For the first time our cheeks are wet'. (p 60)

The collection's trajectory is towards absolution, to 'find a way to forgive' (p 72): 'this is a thing that we kindly ones are trying to learn -- / forgiveness!'. (p 65) And, at the last, contradictions partly resolved, 'I, a Fury, counsel forgiveness'. (p 73)

To the reader: Be brave and recommend Hampton's collection to your book club. 'The traveller / could do worse than dip into this volume'.

Citation

Stephen Lawrence. 'Review: The Kindly Ones by Susan Hampton' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

'Her work is at once mythic and contemporary ... challenging and innovative, full of irony, humour, wisdom and political meaning. It wears its influences lightly, and has integrated fabulism into a vernacular that is at once Australian and of the modern world'. - Drusilla Modjeska

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Reviewed by Andrew Johnson in the April 2004 issue.

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 ... read more.

NRB July 2006

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