poetry
'I LOOK FOR ANSWERS...'
J.S. Harry
Lily Brett
Mud In My Tears
Picador $19.95pb, 119pp
0 330 36011 6
LILY BRETT'S FIRST BOOK, The Auschwitz Poems, was released in October 1986 and won the Victorian Premier's Award for poetry the following year. Her second collection, Poland and Other Poems, came out in December 1987, hot on the heels of the first and the award. Both books received critical acclaim, and tributes from a range of writers, including the discerning John Hanrahan and the British poet Ted Hughes. Mud In My Tears is her sixth collection in just under eleven years and its intensity is likely to win her new readers and to enhance her reputation as a poet.
Born in Germany in 1946, the child of Auschwitz survivors, she migrated to Australia with her parents, arriving in Melbourne in 1948. Some of the experiences created in the poems are those of a daughter whose head is full of the voices and stories of people who lived through concentration camp experience, who bear witness and tell stories of those who died. The 'bearing witness' and telling stories is compulsive and obsessive. In 'I Can't Leave Them':
and people
that were lived
the hair was packed
somewhere in Germany
and the hair
whose hair contained traces
the hair was safe
She uses first person singular and her narrative 'I', in a variety of moods, over time, poem after poem, contributes to a reader's sense of the book's unity, as does the tight organisational structuring of the sections. Brett's 'I' is candid, vulnerable, self-deprecating. The book has an orchestrated mood flow which, at times, reminds one of how a piece of music might work, with quieter passages and crescendos.
The behavioural patterns, of 'mother', 'father', and 'I', through the various poems are investigated, interrogated, depicted, in various situations, sometimes briefly, at other times, their tragi-comic obsessions are foregrounded. We learn of the father's complex attitudes to food, in one poem; in another, of the mother's inability to laugh, in another, of her insistence that her daughter should learn German, in post-war Melbourne. It is Brett's sardonic humour, the variety of the poems, and the skill with which they have been sequenced that hold a reader.
Some of the historical details are horrifying -- the ways in which women and children were used and tortured, the accounts of babies being used for footballs `till they changed colour', the poisons and disinfectants used in sterilisation `experiments' on women's insides, the accounts of the poetry's `mother' and `father', in the ghetto, in the camp, in the final days of the war, the references to incidents involving brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers being murdered, in ways which might yield a survivor a subsequent life of nightmares.
It's the sweep of pain's battlefield and the time the poetical material has had to gestate, the depth it goes back in time, that seems to draw Brett's most effective writing; there are technical ingenuities in the blends and shifts of these longer poems that move fast from one thing to another, without seeming to be either obvious or randomly pointless. She can sometimes be less effective in the shorter poems which don't draw deeply from the memory well, and seem to be more in present time.
'We Spoke Languages', one of her longest and most gripping poems, uses splinters of other languages -- Yiddish, Polish, German and `Camp German' -- a kind of gutter German, used as a lingua franca in the camps -- to create its detail-packed dense, rich texture.
As Brett's readers, we get soundscapes, mindscapes and feelingscapes, with the voice as a privileged teller. She is not a poet who attempts to re-create, as a Jewish filmmaker perhaps might, the historically accurate appearance of a death camp. It is what was experienced that is important. The shortage of visuals heightens the tension. We are drawn close to what Brett chooses to give us as people who cluster nearer to the storyteller's candle when all else is dark.
Sometimes we know how people died but not their names. We know which of the voice's family members died, not what they looked like. One way of creating meaning out of horror is to find a language that corresponds in some way to the inner perceptions of experience -- to make an artefact that can be seen to have a shape, place and presence, out there in the world.
A minimalist style may obscure for a reader the art behind it, but the material wouldn't exist without the language it's clothed in. 'Simple' words do not walk onto a page and arrange themselves. Choice. How many words to a line? Which ones? How to convey this meaning, that feeling?
To feel for the telling detail, to find words for it, then to let the detail sit there and be telling -- without falling, through writer's insecurity, into the trap of trying to prop up what is self-supporting, or the temptation to add vivid, but redundant, adjectives -- this takes nerve, and judgment, both of which qualities Brett shows she has in abundance.
The minimalist line can achieve hesitancy; it can give the feeling of the pause and fall of voice. Brett's skills with the form are in this area. She also uses many of the techniques of oral poetry, including repetition of key phrases, or words, variations on these sometimes producing the dynamic by which the poem is propelled forward. Sometimes the repetition has the effect of a carefully applied braking device, one that builds tension -- one wishes to know what happens next. The pauses accord dignity to what happens in the lines.
I remember streets
The poem continues, a few lines further down:
I've never visited
I've never known
I store memories
in other people's lives
there were fifteen thousand
It was a continuous process. Had the war not ended, the hair would have been processed in a factory that turned it into linings.
pounds of hair
left behind in Auschwitz...
in fifty-five pound bags
ready to be sent to Bavaria
tailors stitched the lining
This poem comes from the middle section of the book, which contains some of Brett's fiercest writing.
into men's suits
it was a good living
mother men were walking
to work in your hair
of your dead mother
and dead sisters
of hydrogen cyanide Zyklon B gas
although the Germans decided
after all it didn't touch
German skin