fourW Thirty-One – NEW WRITING
Launch speech from Tug Dumbly, Gleebooks, 05.12.20
Big thanks to Editor David
Gilbey, assistant editor Ian Stewart, the selection panel, and all concerned, for
pulling together fourW 31 - another great collection, with 70 odd pieces of creative
writing.
And thanks to Riverina Water for the grant that made the issue flow. Riverina Water are apt sponsors because, as David writes in the editorial, water’s a big theme in the issue, which is subtitled NGULUMAN - a Wiradjuri word that translates as ‘large waterhole’. And, as Raymond Carver had it, there’s ‘so much water so close to home’.
David writes in the editorial: Water can be a source, an end (life and death), a medium, indicative of intense or attenuated pain, pleasure, leakage, (ful)filment .. Geographically, cosmically, emotionally, politically, mathematically, botanically …’ he could go on.
As well as a strong aquatic current there are also reiterated themes of Fatherhood, ageing, and, as might be expected, a light dusting of Covid 19.
To dive in -
Jude Aquilina’s poem ‘Road Trip to the Mid North, SA’ has some nice images:
‘… silos are giant chalks scribbling clouds / on the brilliant blue tarp of the sky; round hay bales / are jam rolls on Goliath’s plate,
‘That Rabbit the Moon’, by Lyn Chatham, can be read whole:
That Rabbit the Moon
gathers twigs sets the fire / sweeps leaves
plumps the pie / feeds babies, settles to the glow
of eventide under a pot-pourri of stars
oblivious to my longing to be on the same plane
away from the boys behind the shelter shed
and the sun cracking apart the dam and earth
Jennifer Compton’s ‘The Idiolect of the River’ considers the arbitrary way we name things, and also fragility and impermanence:
Why does one river swallow another? Why does one river
lose its name? One or two thin seasons of rain up in
those hills?
a tilt in the lie of the land?
Of course no 4W would be complete without the most excellent Michael Crane, who is here today. Michael explains the mystery of ‘How the God’s Make Rain’ – it’s a great piece, and I’ll let Michael do justice to it in person.
If I mention David Gilbey’s poem ‘World Enough’, it’s not just for good politics – it’s also a good poem, that takes in the re-structured world of Covid, and Zoom meetings. It also looks at the paradoxical intimacy such forced strictures can engender. David would probably like to read it himself.
We were wrenched by Azusa’s ‘Thought for the Day’: / working at home, quarantined, she said / determinedly practising Chopin nocturnes and Beethoven concertos / for cancelled performances, this is “a special opportunity / to spend time with my family:. Politely, she informs us her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, is about to begin chemo … / Never really close to her father, they now talk every day / about her mother – there is ‘new beauty out of new pain’.
‘The Old House’, by Fran Graham, centres on the alluring beauty and pathos that many of us find in old and decayed things. Here a house is personified as
a vagrant, as fallen boards give the appearance
of blackened and missing teeth …
… Its love of how things were resonates with mine. / I
approach the old steps / to sit on its knee as I used to. / It holds me like a
sacrament; / age-old incense pleasures my senses / and for a quiet hour / I am
excited to have nowhere to go.
Cary Hamlyn’s poem ‘The Return’, is a moving evocation of a dead friend. The dead and missing remain lodged in us, stillborn in memory.
In the photograph, the face
of a man dead now for thirty-three
years is smiling into a future
which never delivered.
In the album are three faded photos
of Kathmandu and torn ticket stubs …
[…]
… How I savoured the scents of love
we left like offerings on all
those pre-loved
mattresses.
The ashtrays overflowing, your jeans
drying on the hotel balconies.
the stench of the sewers below
How I worried and waited for you to return,
your blonde curls like a foreign flag
in the crowded Asian streets.
How my heart feels, years later –
still a cage without its bird.
As I look at your photo,
I think of that time I collapsed
and you carried me home –
so ill I’d lost the will to go on.
How you put the record on and played
‘It’s a Beautiful Day’.
‘Steam’, by Rory Harris, relates to the Ageing, and the people who care for them. The poem has pathos, tenderness, and inevitable sadness:
You are able
to bathe
yourself
leaning forward
sculptured
from the shower chair
the jets of water
run rain warm
over the pink skin
topography
of your body
until you have
grown impatient
enough of that moment
& then the measured
progress of patting you dry
the IV line in your arm
glad wrap
& you rise as a mother
would to greet
a child at her knees
& I bend your arms
dressing o so gently
through fresh blue cotton
in the steam teared
bathroom of ward 7E
‘Ramblings of an older flanneur’, by Ross Jackson,
sees an older man grumbling at the twitterati World of social media distraction.
But he has a resigned awareness of the futility of his complaint:
stacked on every corner
where bales of newspapers should have been
heads down people
eyerolling conflated information
blinded by electronic smoke
warm noses snug in Styrofoam trays
missing the joke at Lord of the fries …
From Andy Kissane we have ‘On Losing Another Argument
with my Boyfriend’, with this lovely thick image:
… I’ve been rehearsing / what I want to say over and
over /,
like a cement mixer spinning clockwise / on the way to
a job, and the grey sludge comes rushing out of my anxious mind.
‘River Float’, by Mark Langford, has more water:
Patchwork cows, expectant, trail two dusty boys,
Struggling with a tube from the old grey Fergie,
Their arms stung by hot rubber as holds are adjusted,
And prickled feet are lifted to be rubbed and scratched.
Already any pockets of soft, flavoured air,
Sheltering under willows and river gum,
Have been chased away by a dry northerly.
Cicadas play loudly on tiny washboards, on and on.
‘After the Fire’, by Phillip Muldoon, has regeneration,
not only of nature, but relationships:
and my wife,
she wraps her arms around me,
tight and strong
as leaves around a tree
‘Noolbengers’ is an indigenous word for honey badgers.
It’s a poem by Jan Napier looking at the
human threat to the natural world, and contains this great line:
Shadows have the same language everywhere.
‘Re-vision’, by Jan Pittard, looks at the complexities
of our everchanging attitudes to race, and racism:
As a child
I had a golliwog called ‘Lovely Levi’
(after Jewish friends of my parents)
I loved his red and white trousers
before I had knowingly seen a minstrel
or heard Jimmy Webb immortalise ‘a strip-ed pair of
pants’
in Macarthur Park.
I really like ‘Washing’, by Sarah Rice, a compelling
take on pegging out laundry. It shows something else that poetry can do well - bring
to life microcosms and seeming mundanities in fresh, sharp ways.
…But when all’s done there is a show
of all my week’s undressing
A telling of my days with flying coloured flags
when I return in quiet dusk
they hang still and full and tired from days turning
They fill the bag twice what it was
when we set out this morning.
‘Misfits’, by Les Wicks, is a fine poem, and Les probably
wants to read it himself …
… All those kids that don’t fit in
the scrawny, speckled & sick,
those adults who wear the braid
& bindings of their position but feel
they belong in another room –
spring will always come.
Albeit straggly and thorned
as kernels
we will one-day be a part …
some type of copse.
STORIES:
I liked ‘The Long Road to Akik-Asik’, by Erwin Cabucos.
It’s about the difficulty of a brother forgiving his dead brother, whose ashes
he’s about to scatter at a waterfall. The event is streamed on
Facebook to an audience of parents, siblings and
friends, scattered around the globe.
He reaches the entrance to the Falls, Dodong starts
the Facebook Live on his phone and raises his selfie-stick to pan across the
hills and plains. He almost kisses the Asik-Asik Falls sign as he begins the
trek and focuses briefly on his feet brushing the brown, pebbly dirt. His
screen rains with thumbs up and love hearts …
The man hates his dead brother for a vile deed he
committed. But a note he finds in his brothers urn of ashes, along with the
power of nature, help heal that hate.
He reaches the Falls where white sprays of glistening
water burst like crystals through the green wall on a mountain and splash as
they hit the river below. Lots of waterfalls. He closes his eyes to allow the
breath-taking view to imprint on his mind then opens them again to marvel the
spectacular sight, his ears blasted by the gushing of water. So much water.
Generous. Abundant. Refreshing.
‘Smoko at Piker’s Hole’, is a story by Jake Dean’.
It’s set at Kurnell, the site of Captain Cook’s first landing. It centres on
surfing, and the different claims of ownership of surfing … who invented it - Hawaiians, Aboriginals? … By implication, the
story suggests the idea of contested claims of historical ownership in general
-
The wave he’s talking about, commonly known as ‘Ours’,
is a notorious reef-break that breaks menacingly close to the rocks at Cape
Solander, just out of our view. Blake says he’s surfed it, which I don’t doubt – his Instagram is filled with shots of
him posing in huge aquamarine barrels. But sometimes I wish he’d shut up about
it’.
There’s a lovely bit of memoir in Adele Dumont’s
‘Eulogy for the Living’ – a eulogy addressed to her still living father:
I myself have always found eulogies wasteful … that
we, the living, should need to wait until someone dies to put pen to paper, to
be able to tell them plainly what they meant – or mean – to us. Which is why
I’m writing this eulogy of sorts to you, Papa, well before you’re gone.
The children kept a pet and insect cemetery:
You and Mama never mowed that patch; to mow over the
top of that square would have felt a kind of sacrilege. The cemetery started
nestled in a corner, and then expanded over time, and this spot where the dead
lay buried became the part of the lawn that was most alive. I never liked
close-cut lawn, just like I never liked your beard too freshly shaven, too
prickly; when you kissed me you would swipe your beard against my cheeks just
to hear me squeal.
‘The Power – My Own Knowing’, by Don Dyce is, is
another reminiscence, of father as larger than life hero. It’s also about
childhood oneness with the natural world.
Here the child shelters in a hole in an old tree:
So in that timber, no longer alive to the demanding
world, at the first sound of a distant motor or birds listening, I ran with a
little ear and just a small touch of the ecstasy of escape and remained unseen
in the heart of the tree with a sense that animals, and birds, and people born
of the earth were resonant with this hidden space in soil and wood; in a
numinous heart where pain and desire were as silent as the stillness that
anticipates the passion of the desert storm.
On a darker note is ‘Someone for Everyone’, by Kristin
Hannaford. It’s a dystopic story about dealing with an ageing population, and
is maybe closer to the bone than we’d care to believe. For me it has shades of
Peter Carey’s early short fiction, and I think it’s some of the strongest
writing here:
‘In the first wave, people could select Guests
according to their gender, religion, and cultural backgrounds. It became a kind
of status symbol to have a middle-class, educated Guest. People began to trade,
to do deals. Ugliness began to characterise the ‘selections’; it became
difficult. An organisation known as Culturally Sensitive Placements (CUSP)
gained ground, and it was widely accepted that they were a front for the
‘Whites with Whites’ movement. CUSP’s involvement was popular for a period,
particularly in the wealthier suburbs, but in the end, there were simply not
enough ‘whites’ to go around’
‘After the first redistribution, Australia recorded a
significant number of Ninth Generation deaths. A spike in break-ins to
veterinary practices, doctor’s surgeries and chemist shops suggested a kind of
desperation. People didn’t know how to deal with the elderly. They’d all been
shut away for so long. Now they were in our houses. In our bedrooms. In our
lives. An undercurrent of death permeated the national outlook. People
experimented with homemade recipes and humane methods to euthanize. Others
simply took their guests out to a clifftop and pushed. In most cases, the
authorities turned a blind eye or ruled ‘Death by Natural Causes’.
On a lighter note is ‘The Knee Connoisseur’, by
Penelope Jackson. A grandma prides herself on her solid knees, and in fact has
a knee obsession, picking fault in the weak knees all about her. Sadly, Granny
suddenly dies:
Her daughters, traumatised by her sudden death, fussed
over how they would lay out Granny’s body. In a moment of clarity and generosity
Esta offered to sort out the situation and quickly ushered her sisters out of
the room. Esta turned Granny onto her back so her knees were up in the air. She
then hauled herself up onto the bed, straddled the corpse, and with all her
weight and strength crashed down on Granny’s knees. The snapping and grinding
noise of bones breaking was harrowing but Granny was laid out straight. Esta
had to wait a few minutes before inviting her sisters back into the room for
she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face.
‘A Perfect Couple’, by the mischievous Helen Lyne, is a
lovely little black tale about a Machiavellian cat. [I’m sure Helen will read
it to Puurrrfection herself]
‘Drop’, by Mark Rogers centres on Ecstasy, the drug. It’s punchy, sharp piece of writing, tracing the drug arc from peak to trough.
I’m dancing and all my friends around me are dancing
and everybody is dancing and the love in this room is dancing and I know with
absolute certainty that given the chance I would expand the sexual horizons of
everyone here. Every part of my body is an erogenous zone. I’m like a giant
tongue. An enormous clit. I possess a million dicks. People could orgasm just
from like, my smell. From the smell of the sweat I leave on the dance floor at
the Illawarra hotel: SMELL ME MOTHERFUCKERS!
‘Trailing’, by Steve Sharman, is a good story about a
drunk divorced dysfunctional dad at his daughter’s wedding, with black thoughts
and a gutful of regrets. [I’ll let Steve read from it himself].
Lastly, I’ll mention ‘The Honeybee Table’, by Bev
Smith – this is another goodie - families, squabbling, and simmering sibling
resentment as adult children divide their dead parent’s estate – the
sentimental versus the hard-nosed and practical. There’s a nice twist in the tail
worthy of one of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the unexpected’. I won’t give it away, apart from to say that
in the ‘stuff’ war between the keepers and the chuckers, the Marie Kondo
Minimilists are the Big Losers (yay!)
This by no means exhausts all the good stuff that I
could have singled out, but I’ll let you discover all that for yourselves.
