poetry
Dorothy Hewett
Dorothy Porter
What A Piece of Work.
Picador $17.95pb, 276pp, 0 330 36128 7
DOROTHY PORTER HAS adopted the verse novel with extraordinary
success. The Monkey's Mask was a runaway bestseller, won several
prizes, was adapted for stage and radio, and is currently being
made into a film. Always deeply aware of the problems of poetry
and communication, Porter's move into this genre has caught the
public imagination and broken the barrier between poetry and
prose. What A Piece Of Work (the title is taken from Hamlet's
soliloquy) is a bleak but dramatic story that deals without
flinching with the pain, disgust, violence and vulnerability of
madness, as well as the disturbing power of those who govern the
lives of the incarcerated.
Sometimes I'm jealous
He can travel,
This morning
'We both know
In spite of his occasional violence and paranoia -- he hates women and communists -- Frank is certainly the most attractive character in this verse novel. By contrast with the cold-hearted Cyren he has a humanity and sweetness.
Contemporary reports of the abuse of mental patients, dubious
experiments and the closure of hospitals without providing
alternative accommodation or proper treatment make this new book
very topical. Set in Callan Park Psychiatric Hospital in 1968 and told in the first person by Doctor Peter Cyren, a forty-two year old psychiatrist who specialises in shock treatment, Porter takes a big risk with her narrator. From the outset Cyren's cynical manipulation of the patients and the women in his life gives a repellent quality to the narrative.
The claustrophobic setting is alleviated with forays into the streets of Sydney, Kings Cross and the shabby tourist resorts of the Blue Mountains. Here Cyren, has an incestuous encounter with his beautiful but destructive mother, an experience which fuels his future misogyny. The descriptive sections on the Blue Mountains with their run-down guesthouses and tearooms are some of the most powerful in the book.
Porter has a racy, colloquial style and has arranged her new book into the same sharp stanzas she used in The Monkey's Mask. These short lyrics are flexible enough to encompass the everyday drudgery of life in the mental hospital as well as the moments of crazy vision that soar beyond its sandstone walls. The relationship between the mad poet, Frank (is there an echo here of Francis Webb?), and the psychiatrist, gives the story much of its momentum:
Where Frank can go
Of where Frank can go.
he told me,
down the cracks
of the floor
in his ward.
he has spent
in the Land of the Dead
tussling with Dante
over the true colour
of the soul.
when Our Lady approaches'
A collection of pretty unforgettable characters inhabits the story. Penny-Jenny burns herself and twelve other patients to death with Cyren's 'pretty cigarette lighter'. Tamara, 'the pathetic, stoned tart' in Cyren's words, overdoses and leaves him a note saying 'Goodbye cruel Peter'. She also leaves him her 'considerable stripper's assets', a small fortune that allows him to set himself up in private practice: