Angels
of Breath
David McCooey
Kevin Brophy
Portrait in Skin
Five Islands Press, $16.95 pb, 79 pp, 0864187521
Andrew
Sant
The Islanders
Shoestring Press, £7.95 pb, 63 pp, 1899549722
THERE
IS A STORY that when the saxophonist John Coltrane remarked to
his bandleader Miles Davis that he didn’t know how to make
his solos shorter, the trumpeter replied, ‘Take the instrument
out of your mouth’. Knowing when to stop is a key feature
of artistry. But then, strong originality often ignores such maxims.
This tension came to mind when reading Andrew Sant’s The
Islanders: 'I wasn’t sure if it was too ambitious or
not ambitious enough; whether the effect required was Davisian
terseness or Coltranesque maximalism.' Sant’s seventh book
of poems concerns a fictional island close to a dominating continent.
The island is remarkably like Tasmania (‘Three syllables,
/ no four, relayed as the name / of the island’), but it
is too much like Tasmania to be properly allegorical and too abstract
to be really vibrant. That is not to say that Sant has written
bad poetry — far from it — but this is a curious work.
Leitmotifs create Sant’s world: tourism, extinct wildlife,
fireworks and celebrations, shooting, bureaucracy. The island’s
history shares a tension expressed in Tasmanian literature: an
obsession with history matched with a desire to forget it. ‘The
name struck on a brass plate / is echo / of an invasion; // the
burden of place / it identifies, jettisoned / into forgetting.’
Colonial history, however, is curiously undramatic: ‘A conflict,
close up / like a family at Christmas / which has got past / pre-drinks
to the crackers’. This suggests a satirical tone (and there
is considerable satire in the book), but the incommensurability
between the events and the tone is unsettling.
Sant is best when being lyrical and he can produce extraordinary
effects with small displacements. This is seen in the dramatic
monologue ‘A Firework Maker on the Domestic Front’,
which ends, ‘Now rockets are shrieking / towards the stars
or, if not, I explode’. The parenthesis is everything, and
it produces a startling moment. Sant also has an impressive way
with imagery: ‘A fence, inspected, for frontline / of
a feud; families / slammed like shutters / against an ancient
grudge’; or, ‘A distant gunshot, then another, / quoting
the horizons’; or, ‘Weather rubbed, on the horizon,
/ it’s a smudge; then there’s / the indelible ink of
the sea’. These examples also show Sant’s talent for
arresting beginnings.
Corporeal existence is central to this book, but the work is also
shadowy, occupied by thylacines half glimpsed in the bush. Silence,
echoes, rumours, and absence all inhabit the book. Even the fireworks
that erupt in the sky ultimately lack substance (presumably the
point). The final line of a meditation on an old, shadowy photograph
could apply to the whole book: ‘who are these people? Where?’
AS
THE TITLE suggests, the shadowy condition of real life is at the
heart of Kevin Brophy’s latest book of poems. Portrait
in Skin is continuous in style, content and sensibility with
Brophy’s two previous collections, Replies to the Questionnaire
on Love (1992) and Seeing Things (1997), but where
these were fine collections, Portrait in Skin is something
else again.
Deeply rooted in experience, Brophy’s poems are neither realist
nor confessional. His poems are often observations occasioned
by the domestic — moving house, going to the laundromat —
but they are never banal, and they don’t rely on a facile
strangeness seen sometimes in magic realism. The figure of the
Angel can certainly be facilely strange, but in ‘Wings’
it has a unique poetic energy: ‘My wary angel is confused
by doors and shelves / and the cloudy shape of impassable couches.
/ When my angel stands beside me now its closed-up wings / are
dark and coffin-shaped, condemned like dreams / to their own impossible
existence.’ As this suggests, Brophy’s poetic world
often comes into being through arresting contrasts: the priest
is ‘tying the girdle round himself like a mountaineer’;
‘The bike beneath him is his insect-double’; ‘I
climb out of the night unsteadily as if I have landed / here,
for the first time, nauseous with memory’.
Brophy’s work illustrates an openness to fragility and a
need for laughter. The former is seen in the achingly beautiful
poems ‘Turning fifty’ and ‘Horizon lines’.
Laughter is found in the marvellous comic poem ‘A redemption
tax’. The poet’s ordination at the hands of the Australian
Tax Office is a good joke in itself, but for me the funniest lines
are almost throwaways:
My
visitor who was wrapped in a wall-hanging of Indian design
said she made everything herself. Even the cushions at home.
It was a decision she had made.
Immediately I wished I made everything myself too.
Brophy
is clearly a master of deadpan, but his humour can also be more
whimsical (a peculiarly difficult mode to pull off). For ‘Haiku
and Senryu’ and ‘Advice to poets’, Brophy employs
a comic tone of great subtlety. This is also evident in the poem
‘Fifty: a work in progress’: ‘at fifty with death
still a distant cloudburst / you have a back and a neck and two
knees that hurt … / at fifty waking early and tiring by midafternoon,
/ already 18,263 days have gone up like balloons.’ It is
remarkable how often humour and fragility occupy the same poem.
There is much variety here. As well as comic and lyrical poems,
there are philosophical poems, such as ‘Recovered life’
(on memory), and ‘If I could tell you’, a poem on time
(‘Is it an inhuman music, is it green, or some god’s
modest gift’). There is little to fault in this extraordinary
collection: a couple of poems (no more) strike me as failures;
no one picked up that the first lunar landing didn’t occur
in 1968; and the cover is pretty awful. (Why are the covers of
Five Islands Press books so consistently unappealing?)
Brophy’s delicacy of tone and intellectual energy sometimes
produce a kind of surrealism. In ‘As they say’ and ‘To
say’, the surreal play of language entirely makes up each
poem, but even here the ‘real world’ isn’t replaced
so much as the source of the surreal (‘the longer they dog
you / the more swimming makes sense’). But sometimes Brophy’s
eye for the nuances of experience is artistry itself. This can
be both utterly familiar and profoundly moving, as in the description
(from ‘Morning’) of the poet walking his children to
school:
At
school they kiss me, business-like as birds,
and leave me by the school fence
with other parents also suddenly at a loss
but wanting not to show it. I want to shout a last message —
some kind of reminder to them.
Such
small losses are shadowed by larger ones. Dedicated to the poet’s
late sister (for whom there is an elegy), this collection is deeply
marked by loss and death, seen
in the book’s centrepieces: ‘Why I am a poet’ and
‘What to do when you’re told it’s not cancer’
(the last stanza of which is in itself a minor masterpiece).
‘Why I am a poet’ is a kind of mini künstlerroman.
An extended prose poem, it shows the ambivalent condition of the
life of words (something central to Brophy’s important critical
work, Creativity, 1998): ‘dead in the endless life of words,
it was not easy to know what to do with my life.’ The poet,
as altar boy and then novitiate, learns the sacred power of language,
but also its connection with death, and its inability to redeem
the real world, as the sister’s death so poignantly shows.
Portrait in Skin is a superb book. It powerfully illustrates
the strangely antithetical conditions of life — the shadowy
life of things. In the end, the loss recorded in these poems is
also the source of comedy and love. Stylistically, Brophy brings
to mind both Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ and Davis’s
wit and lyricism. In Brophy’s hands, the instrument of poetry
produces a strange and powerful sound, like the plaster angel
over the sister’s grave that sings:
the
awful prayers no angel could compose
for death up here is still
these nights of secret work
somewhere outside of us.
David
McCooey teaches at Deakin University. His first book of poems,
Blister Pack (2005), was recommended for publication by
John Kinsella.
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