REVIEW #2 FRIENDLY STREET NEW POETS 19

REVIEW #2
Friendly Street New Poets 19
Friendly Street Poets Incorporated, 2018.

Firstly, let me congratulate Friendly Street for resurrecting the New Poets Series. Bruce Greenhalgh’s self-deprecating humour, foreshadowed in his bio and in the ludicrous and playfully luscious title of his collection, “the meteorology of enjambment,” worthily kicks off the anthology. His first poem, “Passionfruit,” confirms his sense of the absurd and his capacity to laugh at himself and the vanity of humanity to make something out of nothing merely for our own amusement. He captures this superbly in his poem, “Before the fireworks,” when the whole poem celebrates the missing of fireworks, rather than their supersonic performance. Why look for the big moments, he asks, when “we can say things and not mean them/ and mean things and not say them/ and understand each other perfectly.” His irreverence for poetic artistry become a delicious irony in the light of his practised and meticulous appreciation of poetic form and devices evident in his tribute to the trail-blazing freedom of e e cummings’ poetry.

Many of his poems have a truth-gathering quality in the tail. He concludes “Five Eyes Wide” with the fact of growing up when the child’s wonder of the world is “replaced by understanding” and he acknowledges the inevitable loss of awe that comes with the new knowledge gained. His frank admission that he would never have made a scientist is given a poetic nobility as he compares the Periodic Table of Elements to “a Soviet era tractor,” lacking in “flair,” “mystery” and “poetry” and of no interest to a mind that is always reaching for the hidden vision, the edge of things, that will take you into a parallel, but poetic, realm beyond the observed objects. The way his poems turn from festive to tragic in “Woodstock,” or from fact-gathering to the mystery of human chemistry in “Things I know about Belgium,” keeps the reader attentive and expecting to turn a corner into a foreign land that seems strangely familiar, yet provocatively exotic. I was completely charmed by Greenhalgh’s poems . . . so charmed I forgave him for his careless attitude towards punctuation because there was so much going on to capture – and keep – my attention.

I was less forgiving towards Geoffrey Aitken because he confessed to being an English teacher in a past life! I had the impression that the missing punctuation in Aitken’s poetry was not an artful choice to make a point (as in the case of Greenhalgh’s “in the wake of e e cummings”), but more of a confusion as to where a thought begins and ends. The choose-your-own-adventure style of poetry did not appeal to me, but may seem quite innovative to others. I prefer my poet to do the work of crafting the poem before I see it, rather than leaving me options/possibilities/thought bubbles/choices. On the other hand, there is the little gem that jumps up and bites you in the buttocks. I’m talking about “to me, for you.” In just eight short lines, Aitken takes a satirical swipe at post-colonial Australian ignorance and misplaced arrogance. That short, sharp blow is again achieved in the five lines of “fossils fuelled,” directed at climate change deniers, with its bitter humour in the rhetorical question: ‘how can my feet remain grounded/while I keep my head above water?’

Aitken is interested in the lives of others and that is evident in the empathy of “inflexible intent” which recognizes, not just the immigrants’ difficulties, but their long and rich socio-historical contexts that are so often brushed aside in our education system. And in “ghost ships” his compassion is foremost, along with the willingness to see “the discarded/the misfit or the rejected” in a different light, as people who are living amongst “the shadows/we cannot see” which are their reality.
Last, but by no means least, Maria Vouis drills into her experience as a child of immigrants “in a two-tongue world.” The exploration of her relationships with her mother and father uncover a rich vein of self-understanding. The final couplet of “Sonnet to Mother’s Eyes” encapsulates the world of the immigrant’s child who must shoulder the burden of being their mother’s conduit to the new world. At the same time, these mothers bequeath their child a sense of dual identity as they straddle two worlds. This is something which comes out very strongly in “The Body Mother Made Me,” as Vouis acknowledges the essence of her mother’s continued presence in her sense of self. Swirling, dream-like confusion in the poem, “Mother’s Gift,” with its sadly ironic title, captures the aftermath of loss, viscerally experienced through the concrete images of the “brown bottle/disgorging a puzzle of bitter pills” strewn across the railway track and the “snapshot she sent” that remains behind. The allusion to the tragic Anna Karenina evokes a compassion for a woman drowning in the depths of her emotions. “Father Re – found” and “Aegean Dreaming – Sestina for Hands” grow out of the same painful loss, but I find greater pathos in these remembrances of a father and daughter who didn’t have a chance to bond, separated by the sea and misunderstandings that cut grooves in a teenage girl’s heart. These inward excursions into the past are the poems that move me most deeply. They hold within them an unforgettable and inseparable mixture of the poet’s vulnerability and strength.

In quite a different vein, Vouis’ prose poem with haiku interpolations, “Dogs in Moonlit Wheat,” capture a time and place with, again, concrete images building on concrete images: “panoramas of ripe wheat,” “the terpene scent of eucalyptus,” “air hung viscous with oil droplets,” “red dirt tracks shimmering with crystal salt” as “small children ride tall tractors.” The scene is quintessential Australia, bringing a startling cross-cultural element into the landscape through the use of the haiku form to sketch the Australian bush. All three poets bring their unique view of the world together and the reader will be moved and challenged, and find themselves reflecting on their own life’s journey in response.