Reviewers risk getting it wrong, and comparative poverty creates unwanted necessities. New poetry books rarely come my way, so the task of reading and commenting on these three reminds me of dancers learning the Cancan; at some stage they must take the leap and drop to the floor in the splits, head to knee, legs a terrifying 180 degrees apart.
For women, writing anything at all mostly involves the splits of head bowed to domestic duties, with poetry on the back foot. No wonder the domestic, the body, and the visual frequently emerge as subject matter. Miriel Lenore's In the Garden invites the reader to a stroll by the plants in the Adelaide Gardens; Gina Mercer's Handfeeding the Crocodile offers the support system of a warm and sensual woman friend; Patricia Sykes's Modewarre: Home Ground evokes primarily a lake in Victoria, with the musk duck at its heart. But there the similarities end.
These three works arranged themselves, for me, into a hierarchy of accessibility, once their sheer glossy confidence, their unmarked newness (untouched by the pillar-to-post history of second-hand and library books) had ceased to intimidate. I hesitate to assign a similar relative merit, yet a stroll through Lenore's garden is the task most easily accomplished and set aside, while Mercer encourages repeat visits to her warmly robust view of life's realities. Sykes, initially daunting, took me deep into my own home ground of poetry, and the journey more than repaid the effort of getting there.
Yet these are works by women, reviewed on a site specifically devoted to work by women (is there a comparable site for men, I wonder?). What whiffs of womanhood, by what names, are offered? Take that figurehead of the feminine, the rose, to which all three poets allude in some way.
Lenore is an obvious place to start; her scholarship in matters botanical is laudable. Yet the inscription by Sappho to ‘Rose Garden' (51): ‘all the lovely and beautiful times we had/All the garlands of violets and roses' hints at views not elaborated upon in the poem, unless you count ‘emblem of woman's mystery.'. Indeed Lenore's narrator comments on her own confusion when faced with the profusion of rose varieties: ‘In this paddock of excess where to start?' And concludes:
At the trial beds a competition has begun
To compare the incomparable
No poem comes
The roses like good wine need no bush
An end note reminds that ivy bushes were used to advertise taverns and wine sellers in Roman times, hence the saying ‘Good wine needs no bush'; but it seems too long a bow to draw for bush here to be associated with the feminine. The following poem, ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison' (53) conveys adeptly a history about a famous rose, succinctly listing its salient points, and citing various associated notables. Yet the poem, while making some nice references to the present day rose under a painting of an early specimen: ‘perfume envelops the roses/the painting, the viewer,' asks and celebrates no more than this intoxication with itself.
Lenore does acknowledge the territory of the ‘toothed vagina' in the poem ‘Mammillaria' (46), while describing the ‘nourishing' and ‘welcoming' nipples of this cactus, asking ‘is this a sign of men's/fear-desire ambivalence?' The final lines:
Fine axillary wool
cushions the spines
masking their threat
Circlets of bright flowers
encourage risk
make me wonder if this poet wasn't censoring herself under the constraints of some male fund-related gaze; she is willing to take the risk of mentioning vagina dentata, but engaging further in public with it is another matter altogether.
Not so Mercer, who is overtly feminist and unafraid of bodily parts, as in the luscious ‘Molly Brings Roses' (53):
all the women […]
burying their faces
in delicate corolla
fuchsia, cream, lilac, claret.
[…]
perhaps we women
like any excuse
to bury our faces
in symbolic petals
in satisfying aromas
[…]
a public affirming
of our secret belief:
our labia are subtle
perfumed corolla
in which we long to bury our faces
The idea of further explorations of sexuality is at least entertained, whatever the actual constraints might be. The preceding poem (‘Spice') (52), speaks to ‘my solid male ballad,/beard familiar as our daily bread' as an established presence in the narrator's life, while the title poem, ‘Handfeeding the Crocodile' (54), carefully leaves the lover ungendered, while the following ‘Our Frequency' (55) suggests a clandestine meeting which leaves the narrator imagining ‘caressing the cilia of soft-dark crevices/my fingers will never touch'.
Sykes' ‘family Roseacea' (78) give roses a laconic nod: ‘family of beautiful glow/and desirable smell ' . The poem begins with strawberries (part of the rose family) and moves swiftly into the politics of food, agribusiness, and refugees. No dallying with sexuality here, unless you count the co-opting of its imagery:
to eat this fruit therefore
would be to tongue-stroke
the bank roll
of any chief executive
[…]
the fruit knife's
a more succinct edge
[…]
each slice into flesh a chant
each a blatant economy
This is the nature of Sykes' subject matter; the most ordinary things become starting points for startling leaps into wider issues, sometimes glanced at sideways, at once ‘elusive and allusive' (Bev Roberts, blurb for Wire Dancing , end pages of Modewarre: Home Ground ). There are plenty of references to women and women's issues, for example:
in this house the tended walls tended
by a woman losing her finger-prints
her hand palely on his shoulder
like a vagina defecting from itself
(‘the efficacy of a lantern on the forehead', 55);
and:
the house of sex
keeping a woman pregnant
as if passion were a weapon
annual and fatal
(‘the honey lands', 49).
But we do not find in Sykes the direct, the frontal approach to the feminine, though I will discuss later how I believe she is writing very much from that mode. There is no apparent angel in the house here.
Lenore's In the Garden disappoints in that the redolent possibilities of the feminine metaphor are relatively neglected. One doesn't wish to be prurient; it's just that the struggle continues in establishing a climate that allows women to speak their truths. Here was an opportunity to reassign meaning, via the most obvious symbolism of flowers, to the currently degrading nomenclature of female parts. Was it the funding fathers of the Adelaide Botanic Garden she sensed looking over her shoulder? But no, the book is published by the independent Wakefield Press. The device of a poem per plant, or group thereof, is as good as any for serious and poetic comment or revision, and is indeed ‘so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin' (Jan Struthers quoting Mrs Miniver, inscription to In the Garden ).
I may well be underrating Lenore: her subject matter is well-researched and nicely described. The book is divided into four parts, roughly encompassing the establishment of the garden, trees, individual flowers and plants, and structures. Mythology and history weave through the poems, which are mostly written in the present tense as observed by the narrator coming upon various items and musing thereupon. She is respectful of the founding fathers and mothers, carefully listing them in litanies that often read more like notes for a poem than a fully realised work of the imagination:
Planted twelve years ago by
our Premier and Okayama's Governor
To grow friendship between two different
and distant lands(‘The white goddess: prunus persica, flowering peach' 18-19).
One reads to the end, awaiting a revelation of what can be done with this image; the tree, through a trick of the light, becomes ‘Australia's White Goddess of corn and honey/[…] ancient mother of states and people, [and] may even bring us peace'. By what connection is unclear.
Where is the poet's inner garden? Mythological references abound: Sappho beautifully prefaces the plant of her namesake, Rhododendron ‘Sappho': ‘Shiver when Sappho speaks of her Heart Beat ‘ ( ‘Sappho', 27). More is hinted at than the narrator will give away, and one wonders if self-preservation in this still-patriarchal world isn't the issue:
Shiver at this world
of dramatic blossoms:
dark eyes in white faces
inky flares at each heart
Or perhaps it is a slant look at those perceived to be very much other?
Little of the personal is foregrounded here; the poems could almost as easily have translated into a catalogue of notes on the plants, with the addition of a few carefully calculated risqué comments. The book is perhaps aimed to please those who stroll through the garden on a Sunday afternoon, whose gaze might be caught by the pure botanics of the glossy pink lotus on the cover. The economic rationalisation of poetry? Why not? Poets have to live too. My suspicion is that Lenore has deliberately chosen the safety of her enclosure: a poem discussing ‘people-sized weather stations' which invite participation during Artists' Week is titled ‘No wind no rain':
these stilted boxes invite me in
limit my sight to sky and sign
encourage me to listen
to explore more and more
focus on the weather of my mind (76)
Clemency of focus is the norm, raising the question of readership. Certainly there is little to shock mainstream sensibilities in this floral poetry, even when it appropriates some of feminism's snider modes: ‘On the lawn/the page-boys scuffle/dressed to kill' ends a comfortable nuptial description in ‘Wedding Photos' (70). Even the most steely-eyed conservative matron would surely allow herself a knowing smile, despite the deeper menace encoded. The same reader might also lift an unalarmed eyebrow at the concept of ‘the immense buttocks of coco de mer/double coconut of the Seychelles' being dubbed ‘the Viagra of its day' (‘Coco Indecent', 71).
For this much progress to be made since the time of Virginia Woolf, we must be thankful. Lenore's work is very readable, and its very lack of challenge may be its strength, making an appeal to the general reader who might not otherwise venture much into poetry. I'd easily give a copy of this book to a dear friend whom I've known most of my life, who did everything I didn't: she stayed with her husband, she stayed on in nursing, she last moved house perhaps 30 years ago. She goes pink and giggles when I tell her some of my stories, and knowingly agrees when I rant on about the parlous state of this and that. And in case I appear to be belittling either Lenore or my friend, rest assured I deeply admire their achievements, born out of staying power and devotion. Thus are gardens created and maintained as a place of refuge from life's more difficult issues.
To Gina Mercer, then. This is the kind of book I'd be happy to give my sister, knowing she'd love its delicate and straightforward raunchiness, its sensitivity to suffering and the deeper issues.
Years ago I did a drawing of snail shells, making their shadows quite black and dominant. A sage artist friend saw it, and commented: ‘Yes, but what are you doing with the shadows?' Mercer's title poem, ‘Handfeeding the Crocodile' (54), engages the shadow of potential loss in whatever forms it might take: ‘ some mundane day/the crocodile may not/just lurk/in our milky tranquillities'. Death, physical and metaphorical, comes in many forms; in this poem the lover may be the agent of the relationship's demise, someday inviting the crocodile ‘to crunch us/to blood and gobbets'. And blood and gobbets are mostly just words to us in this country, where we can expect ‘unpacking the dishwasher', ‘the getting of breakfast', ‘the morning hugs', and ‘the last minute rush' to be the same (‘Never the Same', 59). It's just the news on the radio, until the narrative voice reminds us of the ‘people for whom no morning will ever be the same' after ‘Australia has invaded Iraq'.
Repetition is used to great effect in ‘Never the Same'. Mercer uses a variety of forms, including several concrete poems, in this collection. ‘Beach Bellies' (19) unashamedly protrudes across the page, as does ‘Bulbs' (11), celebrating pregnant women. There is no judgement of the diversity of bodies and bellies; they simply are
citizens of the world as they
release to surge and ripple and flubber
rioting in rich magnolia pinks and creams (‘Beach Bellies', 19).
Grounded in everyday realism, robust yet never trampling, the poems romp and whisper through a variety of forms. ‘Clothes Lines' (57-58) observes three diverse sets of washing: that of a young mother's line ‘bearing a sag of unwhite nappies'; a bachelor's ‘cycling shorts with padded crutch/for his European tenderness'; and ‘butterfly washing [draped]/over time-honoured bushes' in a rainforest. The fourth stanza, as in ‘Never the Same', shocks with the reality of a Darfur mother who ‘longs for the feel of damp washing/against the flint of her skin' and:
lusts for enough water
to wash the desiccation
from her daughter's freshly raped flesh
The notorious Melbourne weather is used as a clothesline for a collection of sage comments on life and loss, finishing with tomorrow's forecast: ‘it's kind of like Melbourne weather it's unpredictable but it just keeps going on and on/and a lot of us go on living there in spite of it being like that' (‘Melbourne Weather Forecasts', 45-47).
Mercer's poems are like nests on the narrow ledges of cliff faces. The material, the closely observed matter of women's lives, is woven into a cosy refuge, a place from which one's own experiences may break out of their shells … yet always there is the vertigo, the reality of the drop to the abyss right there at the edge. Thus, veneers of comfort may be masking a dysfunctional world, as in:
her father
sits in state
at the lemon laminex
waiting to be served
yet ‘the whole weekend [will be] contaminated rubble' if the slightest thing is out of order (‘Every Saturday', 29). This is a world where the litter of ‘skin, soil, pods, grubs or leaves' is sealed off, where ‘the oven bag made sure/the oven was never splattered' (‘Every Friday', 28). The domestic horror stories, referred to here with an unerring metonymic touch evoking rigidity and fear under the threat of violence, are all too familiar.
Can such telling be effective in the ongoing struggle for justice, when it comes to gender issues? We have to think so; at the very least, solidarity is created at the secret level when one reads of such experiences and thereby knows them to be not solely an individual thing. More is going on when women speak in everyday terms of familiar subject matter, than simply exchanging recipes. Mercer has as light a touch with language as our mothers did with scones, and offers sustenance of a kind we hunger for in her metaphoric connections. In ‘Stirring the Porridge'( 61-62), the meaning of the title's term is discovered to be also that of taking one's turn late in a pack-rape. She counters:
I want to create
right now
a world where
to stir the porridge
is only ever
a charm
involving
oats and clean water
the muscled hand of a woman
worn kitchen spoons
a steady old saucepan
and comfort on cold mornings
Her narrator is empowered; any stereotype of a harmless housewife who dabbles in poetry is demolished in ‘Don't be Fooled' (63). This quiver of arrows lists the abilities of two poets: ‘fire builders', ‘meal makers' and ‘valkyries at the boys' bush bash', who:
…scan the subtext of a silent breakfast
acutely analyse the mansion's semantics
in less time than it takes
a currawong
to shuck your oyster eye
They are nonetheless capable of immense tenderness and delicacy of feeling.
With respect, I venture to suggest that many women write poetry at what might be termed ‘entry level', out of full hearts and empathy for the beauty and pity of the world. To write from this perspective in a way not banal or cliched, yet not so abstruse as to alienate itself, is Mercer's gift. Occasionally there is a narrative poem that may work better as a story, as in the poignant ‘Sprinkler Waltzing' where a wheelchair-bound woman is taken by her partner into a private space under a sprinkler in the sun, where ‘they waltz through their temporary fountain' (50) .
The extreme delicacy needed to handle this kind of material perhaps arises from a strong groundedness in a feminist identity, fierce yet tender, as the saying goes. The poem ‘Lizard of Loss', in honour of a drawing by Rebecca Edwards (9-10) describes a drawing of:
a dead lizard
casualty of your slamming window
pressed flat against its own skin
sheer as dried violets
— while asking for the meaning conferred through the title ‘loss'. In the artist's responses may be read echoes of losses associated with motherhood, such as the eggs ‘…pliable/to the small pressure/of a child's annihilating fingers'. Contrast this with the sassy tone of ‘The Houses Here' (18) where houses, presumably somewhere south:
huddle
as if they dread
the next beating
from that unpredictable husband
the weather
are compared with houses in the tropics, which
flaunt their long, slender legs to the breeze
[…]
flounce their verandah skirts
and laugh long and rude
at the mere weather
So Mercer's work puts on a sensible apron, and takes it off too when the occasion warrants. No doubt she'll cock a snook even if shaking in her boots before the crocodile's terrifying eye.
And so to Patricia Sykes. If Lenore offers a café lunch, and Mercer an organically grown and home-cooked meal with a dash of something wicked, then Sykes is more like the Mad Hatter's tea party. An antipodean and female Hatter, to be sure, of acute personal and political sensitivity, whose poetic beverages produce altered states not to be missed.
It's difficult to pin Modewarre down, to isolate meaning from a few lines lifted out of the body of feeling and meaning that the collection constitutes. It's more like a place to be, a lake with birds/sun/rain that asks no words—until the disjunction of the overlaid world kicks in, as it does: patriarchal capitalism, loss of habitat personal and environmental, our black history, our current political shames.
The book's title refers to the Wathaurong people's word for the musk duck, and to Lake Modewarre in Victoria. Sykes introduces the reader to her central image in the first poem, which has five parts: ‘Modewarre—ways you might approach it' (3-11). One senses the narrator allowing the flow of images relevant to her understandings; the reader collects clues to piece together a picture (and many pictures are possible), yet the work permeates as though by osmosis:
ink
mimics the intrinsic knowledge
of worms who being earthed
have their heads deep into it
doubly advantaged by there-ness
and an un-need for meanings (4).
Her searching of the archives produces:
…a bare desk
and you a dark-feather creature
since the time before biblical
like wings against distance
growing now more lucid
now less clear unto yourself
and a speck also burning
and watering in the eye like a splinter
out of this a lake rises and rises
it may yet prove an inland sea
the wraith of it says yes let the eyes weep
let them they have need of
consequence (4-5).
I quote extensively to illustrate the mood, the tone of this work; for me it is emotional, feminine, and deeply personal, yet well informed in the ‘outer' world too, so apparently inimical to the other. Weeping is allowed, privileged; the narrator takes the risk of probing deep into her material, a place too often glossed over, where people ‘don't want to know'.
An Internet search confronts with its usual plethora of sites, hideous and hilarious in their juxtapositions to the subjectivity of the book. The National Register of Public Toilets states there is no public toilet at Lake Modewarre; real estate parades land as commodity; The Geelong Advertiser runs this story:
Modewarre footballers gave each other a bottom-spanking in the showers after their loss to Newcomb last Saturday … Modewarre president Chris Ovens said the bum-spanking exercise was a soft version of ‘a good kick up the backside' and was laughed off by the players at a post-match function …. Modewarre is no stranger to alternative methods of lifting team morale. Back in 1993, the Warriors dressed in women's clothing for a training session with their coach [who later explained] ‘we thought the guys had been burdened by a lack of success and felt we needed to enjoy ourselves and have a bit of fun.' (Jason Shields, ‘ Modewarre loss has a sting in the tail', 11 May 07)
Such shenanigans could hardly be more opposed to the natural world, the feminine, the poetic. One wonders if some of the footballers might be the sons of the ‘schoolyard pack who craved a target, limpid,/mother-sheltered' (‘proximities', 45).
While plenty of references are made in the poems to horrors such as colonisation and refugees, there is no overt opposition established, unless you count as the poet does, poetry as a subversive act (Andy Jackson: Cordite Review Poetry Archives , ‘Andy Jackson Interviews Patricia Sykes', May 2005, Internet.) Rather, the work dives deep within, with bubbles floating upward like fragments of thought processes. We can only construct meaning by our own understandings and associations; this work is so dense with possibilities as to be confusing, if traditional notions of meaning are sought.
The book is presented in three sections: ‘House of the Bird'; ‘House of Water'; and ‘House of Detention'. From the middle section, ‘sanctuary: Swan Lake, Phillip Island' (52-54, winner of the Tom Collins Poetry Prize 2002) asserts ‘how the eyes like linguists are never satisfied/how they'll poke and pry into any lexicon'. The narrator is watching the ducks from a hide, while meditating on their ‘dictionary/of indifference' and the ‘failure of image/as language'. The notion of human presence is also under scrutiny: the light's ‘slow/fingering drift against the skin' may be ‘how trespass/might be tamed'. Once you learn to swim in these waters, to feel and listen rather than to probe as a reductionist vision might, every poem is at once a delight and a wounding. The hide constructed by more ‘outsiderly' critiques, reveals itself to be full of holes; the material under our gaze may leak back in on us, and open up material hitherto kept under wraps. Childhood, the home ground of the book's title, is evoked in its terrors: ‘her father's knife in the yesterday sheep's throat/as the same dread now rushing her pulse' (39, ‘girl at play on the occasion of her mother's death', part three of ‘three years in the flooded paddock', 37-40).
Sykes grew up at Modewarre. In the fascinating and revealing interview with Andy Jackson, she spoke of the associations that began falling into place when researching the meaning of ‘Modewarre':
In attempting to re-create, re-shape the swamp, poetry disturbs equilibrium, especially that of the status quo. How intoxicating: activism, celebration and sleuthing in the one activity. I keep at it because I'm hungry. Each poem is a kind of failure, a mere inkling of the complexity of the swamp. […] for me poetry is very much about the ‘hidden', so to simplify it is also to falsify. It's a difficult tension, at least for those who require justification. I prefer that readers meet me halfway. […]I wasn't hunting a motif when I began researching the English translation, the duck turned out to be a gift, an unlooked for presence. I've been fascinated by birdlife since childhood and I relish being in water so to discover a water-bird at the core of what I was wanting to explore made me a little breathless, even wary. It felt both too easy and too daunting. The themes were a given. I've always associated Modewarre with the themes of belonging, identity and loss. It's a small step from the personal to the communal. On the one hand a white child's loss of a mother and the dislocation that followed: loss of home, family, school, friends, an entire mini culture that for her equalled ‘the world'. And for the Wathaurong the displacement of themselves, their culture, their connection to the Modewarre land. As I wrote, the ripples kept widening: the duck as endangered species, the fragilities of occupation, the self as witness, as possesser and dis-possesser, succeeding waves of migration into arrival or mis-arrival. And always the modewarre slightly out of reach. An indifferent vortex? At the very least a possibility rather than an answer.
(Sykes, Andy Jackson Interview, May 2005, Internet.)
Any writer takes a risk in putting her work out there on the line. For Sykes, the risk is real that readers will take a glance and find the work inaccessible. Some attention is needed and well repays the effort. The poems offer a dreamlike escape, yet one spiked with enough referents of pain and loss to allow one's feet just to touch bottom, albeit squishy, in the lake. As an exploration of one's place in the world, from the ruptures of childhood to a stance on deeply troubling political issues, I found it opened ‘multiple gateways' (Sykes, Andy Jackson Interview) into my own life's material. I urge readers to consider the ecology of the book, and to see the poems as you might the musk duck, on home ground.
On my bemoaning the penurious state of poets, an acquaintance quite seriously asked—‘but couldn't you do birthday cards?' (bless her cotton socks…). Sykes has reminded me of the richness of the inner life; ‘to go deep into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows' (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet , trans. Stephen Mitchell, 2001, 9); and how poets, in all their diversity, slake the soul's thirst: ‘In the country of few taps/succour can dry up like water' (Sykes, ‘visa as pessimist' part ii, 75). Modewarre is the book I'd buy for myself. My thanks, though, to all three poets reviewed for taking the risks of going public, and for getting the work done.
Alison Lambert began writing poetry and short stories while studying as a mature age student at The University of Queensland. She lives on the Blackall Range, north of Brisbane, with her extended family and one-eyed cat.