States of Poetry Tasmania - Series Two
Series Two of the Tasmanian States of Poetry anthology is edited by Sarah Day and features poems by Christiane Conésa-Bostock, James Charlton, Jim Everett-pularia meenamatta, Anne Kellas, Gina Mercer, and Ben Walter. Read Sarah Day's introduction to the anthology here.
please settle me down in
the depths of the river,
scattered ash lodged
in the silt. let metal
tailings weigh, pulp
dissolve my pages
and the sparkling view
of sewage be interred;
do not let me drift out to sea.
Ben Walter
'Weight' first appeared as part of The Red Room Company's 'Disappearing' project.
The old dust was left behind;
it hatched crystals,
snowflakes,
a multiverse
dining with itself
around a table.
Heart twigs beat
against the breath and
winding legs patrol
a speck of flesh;
red neurons fire
the sedge, slip below
the iris of lagoon.
Shuffle the pool,
there are diamonds;
numberless suits,
a face.
The dry has blinked.
The tear can’t miss.
Ben Walter
'Line Up, Teeming' first appeared in 'Poets and Painters: Celebrating the Big Punchbowl'.
if we are straws slurping
at this pool, it is to slake
our own thirst; we have
claimed this land as
ten thousand flagpoles
needing no flag, but
we are gentle sceptres;
a nest dispersed and
cradling paper wings.
this silt: our home,
where all legs hurry
as their days dry up;
this rot: our mother,
tadpole to sedge. and so
we murmur the rhythms
of frogs when our strings
are plucked by breeze;
we are instrument and stave,
a hymn to this, our year.
while some quiver at our spears
lancing air, we know
enough to stake
this tent of water till
the border nears. there,
we open the ground,
let the water through
unfiltered; there is
nothing left to fear.
Ben Walter
'Sedgeland Nation' first appeared in 'Poets and Painters: Celebrating the Big Punchbowl'.
walk hard –
grains of weather glitter like the night has sunk,
streaks of thin stars, light rain sharpening the scrub;
we are small, so small in the draining sky
as squalls stroke searching for our skin.
sweat-slumped on tussocks, raw pools
smoking in the famished sun.
dragging mud across my knees,
I whip my skin with shards.
words are blunt in whisperings of gust.
walk hard –
no honour now for forms of fashioned sand,
trudging hymns and letters from the pines,
so many echoes pressed on pebbles; our feet
recite their chants as eyes beseech
the cool vaults hammered from the cloud,
split pews slung by wavering columns.
the yellow gums were moved,
I have candles in my hands.
this calendar of worship nettles moons.
walk hard –
such easy mist settling in low valleys;
wooden toes adrift from maps, the margins
dense and white. our fingers cease
to link in cramped log barricades with
rats scrawling slogans on the walls. where then,
the vision of our bodies lifted up?
we do not walk as withdrawn saints,
we do not go naked into the west.
Ben Walter
While we circled space,
the paint-stained grass
and the dogs in-and-out
huffing their thoughts, he’d told us
how they tried to gill our work and rest
in languid backyard bays. The bolts
in rock, firm in life and death, were now
exempt from clasping hooks to bring
the bait aboard, protected
like the tiger, like the quolls;
like rocks, we thought
like rocks and sand and water. Well,
rules drift out with tides, and now
on a coastline full of empty hands, four
outcrops wait on a rare rock raised. Levering,
I made one limpet lost, its tiny foot or hand
stepping round the emptiness, clenching
its shell like that would save it. Afterward,
I thought of Bishop’s fish; no
grandeur in that strange thumb
waiting in my palm, no
rights of kingship or respect, no
victories to stand on or trumpets to blast. A drab
shell opening a place to sit, rod sleeping, in
hollow water near the jetty. So why
the strange projection, my own
arriving in another when the knife
wavered over the limpet and my hand,
limpet and hand, till both hands dropped
to paint an old picture on the rocks?
Ben Walter
Ben Walter’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been widely published in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Island, Southerly, and The Lifted Brow. His début novel manuscript was the winner of the people’s choice category in the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. He won the 2016 John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award, and was runner-up in Overland’s VU Short Story Prize. His latest book is Conglomerate, published as part of the Lost Rocks series.
Poems
Claude Monet, 1903–04
When in early morning
London fog throws its veil
of thick organdie over the Thames
dawn espouses dusk.
Confetti is spread over the town
and sequins of frosted dew glitter on the ground.
Victoria Tower, Big Ben and Central Tower
stand like gothic ghosts.
Fog
makes London beautiful
gives breadth to buildings
that become grandiose under its mysterious cloak.
Warehouses become palaces.
Fog is
its own country of subdued landscapes
its own symphony of yellow
orange and black
its own poetry.
France and England mingle in this fog.
Monet could be in Honfleur.
Or dining at the Auberge de Madame Toutain.
He is young again with Camille.
Now he is in his garden in Giverny with Alice.
On the Thames
the ghosts of drowned sailors linger.
Their souls call out but no one responds.
He too is silent and he refuses to accept
the cups of death they proffer him.
The pall of life falls on London Bridge.
His worlds are within a canopy of droplets.
Dreamtime phases out.
The bells of Big Ben re-enact these moments
and the habits of space and time
lie bare in this country of fog.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
The fly lands on the schoolboy's wooden desk.
The boy spots four dark strokes on the fly's thorax
and a body slightly downy.
Like his.
Sunbeam plays on translucent wings.
He is mesmerised by those bulging red eyes
that bestow, through a multitude of images,
a 360-degree view of the world
complete with movement.
He must go beyond caricatures.
To make an impression he needs
to capture the transient effect of light upon colour
to paint en plein air
to use
textured brush strokes
thousands of taches
that will exhibit but only at some distance
the splendour of Harfleur.
That he will do.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
[French version]
Eveil
La mouche se pose sur le pupitre en bois de l’écolier.
Le garçon distingue quatre stries foncées sur le thorax de la mouche
et un corps légèrement velu.
Comme le sien.
Un rayon de soleil badine sur les ailes cristallines.
Il est envoûté par ces yeux rouges protubérants
qui permettent, à travers une multitude d’ images,
de voir le monde à 360 degrés
et à en discerner les mouvements.
Il ne doit plus s’en tenir à des caricatures.
Pour faire une impression il doit
capturer l’effet éphémère de la lumière sur la couleur
peindre en plein air
utiliser
des coups de pinceaux impastos
des milliers de touches
qui dévoileront mais seulement à une certaine distance
la splendeur de Harfleur.
Et cela il le fera.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
Claude Monet, 1908
Monsieur Monet has a new lover.
She calls at two every afternoon
and invites him to stay a few hours.
Worshipped by Whistler, Boudin and Signac
Santa Maria della Salute is not like the others.
From the steps of the Palazzo Barbaro
wrapped in a bestowed fur coat
he impregnates the domes of his mistress
with a nacreous afterglow. He washes her feet
with glistening tufts of pink, blue and gold.
At dusk, when he is spent
he takes his wife Alice in a gondola
to the famous Piazza San Marco
where they may be photographed
with a kit of pigeons.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
Claude Monet Circa 1865–70
It is my life. I must recognise
the future is called the past.
I turn around to contemplate my youth.
My destiny resembles you
and your shadow follows my body.
You are walking in the garden of my eyes.
I owe you everything.
I am no more than your dust
a fine particle of your step.
This dark intimate abyss which rests within me.
It would be so simple to bring it to an end.
My love do you hear this blasphemy?
In each tree a swaying hangman
to each leaf a tear of blood.
The wash of night brushes the roofs.
I shall make death as I made love
my eyes shut and in the groin of the wind
with the ghostly hammer of regret.
I shall read in the skies
the timeless stars caressing your soul.
And as one would lay
a bouquet of jasmine and lilac in bloom
upon a wall of music
you surrender yourself to a moribund love
in the mirror of my closed eyes.
Night has fallen in love.
I have fallen in night.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
[French version]
Au tomber de la nuit
C’est ma vie. Je dois me résigner
le futur se conjugue au passé.
Je me retourne pour contempler ma jeunesse.
Ma destinée te ressemble
et ton ombre escorte mon corps.
Tu flânes dans le jardin de mes yeux.
Je te dois tout.
Je ne suis que ta cendre
une fine particule de ton pas.
Cet abîme noir et intime qui repose en moi.
Il serait si simple d’y mettre fin.
Mon amour entends-tu ce blasphème ?
Dans chaque arbre un pendu qui oscille
à chaque feuille une larme de sang.
Le lavis de la nuit revêtit les toits.
Je ferai la mort comme je fis l’amour
les yeux clos et dans l’aine du vent
avec le maillet spectral du regret.
Je consulterai dans le ciel
les étoiles éternelles qui caressent ton âme.
Et comme l’on déposerait
un bouquet de jasmin et de lilas en fleurs
sur un tympan de musique
tu t’abandonnes à un amour moribond
dans le miroir de mes yeux clos.
La nuit a succombé à l’amour.
Je suis tombé en nuit.
Christiane Conésa-Bostock
Christiane Conésa-Bostock was born in Lyon, France and has lived in Hobart since the 1970s. Christiane, along with The Grove Road Poets (Karen Knight, Liz Mc Quilkin, Liz Winfield, and Megan Schaffner), won First Prize in the Fellowship of Australian Writers competition in 2010 with their book Of Things being Various which was published in 2011.Christiane’s solo poetry collection De passage de France en Tasmanie was published in 2011. Her poems, essays, and stories have explored the migration experience. She has been published online, in literary reviews and books in France, Australia, the United States, and Algeria. She has read her poems at various venues in Australia and in Paris. She is presently working on a collection of poems based on Claude Monet’s paintings.
Poems
He sends me photos
of the singular crimson rosella
who observes him through the kitchen window
as he cooks dinner for one.
He sends me boxes of her best clothes:
designer jackets, silk shirts, tailored trousers.
Asks me to share them among family
even though she was the size of a wren
and we’re all currawongs.
He sends me photo after poignant photo
of white-breasted sea eagles,
soaring roosting gliding.
Years before, knowing death might swoop,
she signed emails: ‘from The White-Breasted Sea Eagle’,
or sometimes, when energy was low: ‘WBSE’.
He sends me photos of her grave
in a paddock so close to the ocean
sea eagles patrolling there
sense the running of rabbits and fish.
He sends me photos of the funeral,
me bearing her coffin with his three sisters,
my face bleak as a cliff
as we lay her in that space –
best birds-eye view of the ocean
and she –
without eyes.
He sends me news of the satin bowerbird
drowned in the liquid compost.
He retrieves the corpse, places it on an ants’ nest.
Later, he sends the clean, exquisite skeleton
to an artist friend who draws skulls,
so frail, so strong.
There are no photos to send,
there can be no speaking of
how our sea eagle is composting now, drowning
in the rich soil of her ocean paddock.
These, our desolate imaginings in that birdless hour,
round three in the morning…
we simply cannot fly there together.
He sends me the last days’ photos,
her three sisters and a niece bundled
beside the aluminium bed
we all knew so well at the end.
We look so bonny and robin-round
beside her wren-bone frail.
She, still railing strong against
the determined flocks of starlings
roosting in her spine, liver, lungs.
He sends me copies of Australian Birdlife,
we speak of the plight of the orange-bellied parrot,
as the wind farms of loss
slice across his sky
as he attempts to migrate
from mated for life
to flying solo.
After my sister dies,
her husband says, Now,
there is the company of birds.
Published in Weaving Nests with Smoke and Stone, Walleah Press, 2015, page 62.
Forget
all you know about Canute,
the king who believed the waves under his dominion,
he could stop the tides by command.
Remember
to bet all you have
on the dead cert
that global warming is real
as real as the Incas are extinct.
Published in Weaving Nests with Smoke and Stone, Walleah Press, 2015, page 26.
Me alongside that world-famous celebrity
The Atlantic Ocean ‒
complaining
I haven’t caught its best side.
La rivière Bow, Banff, Spring 2016
The light gets tired, he writes, and I wonder if water, too, can get weary with all that
flowing & sliding & washing away. In the hotel swimming pool the water looks
weary, constantly banging its soft body against concrete, making the effort to dimple
upwards when disturbed, entered, by our alien soft bodies. Unable to affect any kind
of escape, all means of subversive seeping or flowing being thwarted by hard-faced
concrete & engineers.
But here, this rivière, this water, is energy is wild filling air & eyes, slooshing the
rocky channel … no river bed this, no slouching, idling or sleeping for this river, it’s a
race, a race way, this river is spray & slalom & burble & sing … singing clear, green,
clarity, glacier, white, clarity … rushing through & over & free, so busy & big the
tourists can’t talk on their mobiles. It’s all river & strong & river & loud & over the
waterfall, this miracle of light & sound & water & sound & gravity & light & air &
water & water … they might label it, confine it inside the word {waterfall} – but this
river is not falling – nothing as passive as a fall … not for this dynamo …
it is charging & zinging over the rocks, rapide rapide indeed – it sings as it burns
along, flows over, smoothing edges from the stubborn ancient rocks, singing &
zinging air & skin, all energy & chi & off to the waiting valleys & seas & eager, eager
for its next transformation, incarnation… no, this water body cannot countenance
tired or weary, it is rapide rapide along its race way… this water, the very definition
of irrepressible
Quote from Bruce Beasley’s ‘The Discredited Hypothesis of Tired Light’, Lord Brain: Poems, University of Georgia Press, 2005, page 23.
Extracts from The Dictionary Aquatic
Burble
Distinctive mating call of wild creeks. Rarely heard in cities where this species has been driven underground, incarcerated in lightless, concrete tunnels. Such conditions have proved unconducive to reproduction or generation.
Cloud
A mobile, aerial animal composed entirely of water. Best viewed from above. Best viewed from below. Best viewed from within. Open to interpretation. See Camel or Jellyfish.
Drink
To imbibe the blessing of water. Risk of inebriation or overdose. Symptoms may include perspicacity, light-headedness, revelation.
Fern
Filed in The Archival Repository of Water under the category – DREAM.
File note (in Water’s hand):
Essence of green perfection (and somehow Myself – in the queer way of dreams)
Fountain
Lithe performer (of generally clear disposition) trained by Aquarian engineers to perform perpetual motion and transport delight to public squares. Supplies own hoops and choreography.
Hooshing
Song performed by water whilst falling long distances. Believed to soothe the anxiety of rocks. See Lullaby.
Mist
Soft wrap woven from the belly-fur of ringtail possums. Effective poultice for wounds of the earth and lungs. Administer in slow, deep breaths
Sinkhole
Subterranean act of revenge for centuries of water rights violations. Sabotage may manifest in the swallowing of cars, houses, certainty, whole suburbs.
Spray
A raceme of tiny droplets to be worn on the left lapel of the heart on promising occasions. See: Exuberance.
Waterhole
Bird magnet. Best visited at sunset in the company of Silence.
Gina Mercer enjoys a three-stranded career as writer, teacher, and editor. She has taught creative writing and literature in universities and communities for thirty years. She was Managing Editor of Island magazine, 2006–10. She has published a novel, Parachute Silk (Spinifex Press, 2001) and two academic books (UQP, 1994; Peter Lang, New York, 2001).
Gina has published five collections of poetry: The Ocean in the Kitchen (Five Islands Press, 1999), Night Breathing (Picaro Press, 2006), Handfeeding the Crocodile (Pardalote Press, 2007), and Seasoned with Honey (with three other women poets, Walleah Press, 2008). Her most recent collection, Weaving Nests with Smoke and Stone (Walleah Press, 2015), is all about birds.
Poems
'Extracts from the Dictionary Aquatic'
2016
Okay, I’m from the outside
You know this place that I’m at
The whitefella’s think-society
This outside place that got lost
A think-society claiming it made us
With their blood, their bible and law
So I think it’s just like the inside
To make us like them is the core
Some rules are okay for everyone
Other rules are ‘just-if-I’ crimes
But that’s just another white privilege
And we get nothing but time
As I say, I’m from the outside
In a family home where you belong
Your place is out with us Brother
We need you to be strong
There’s a struggle goin’ on out here
And there’s plenty for you to do
Yeah man, I’m from the outside
And it ain’t so good out here
We still got a hard-road struggle
And families to build and to grow
We can see it’s not good inside man
You shouldn’t be there at all
While you’re away we are too
A big gaol in the outside world
Like a lock-away from the lock-up place
We survive and move on as we do
Our place will be a safe place to share
A belonging place of spirit and law
For we are Original on Country
And it’s up to us to reclaim our home
So we need you to come back here now
Take a role and give us your Black
Yes Brother I’m from the outside
Your place too, when you come back.
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta
I wrote this as Indigenous Writer in Residence in Wollongong NSW. The South Coast Writers Centre host writers in residence program, and have a program at work in the Junee Correctional Centre, working with Aboriginal men in jail. The program is titled ‘Black Wallabies’, and it publishes the inmate’s writings, warts and all, in Dreaming Inside Anthologies. I was asked to write a poem for its fifth publication.
one day I was drivin’ with Buck Brown along the coast
an’ we was talkin’ about white coes on our land
‘til the talk got real intense an’ I wouldn’t wanna boast
but we worked it all out from the start right to the end
now it’s easy enough to see, well it is to you an’ me
why white fellas do their thing wrong way ‘round
their old men made a structure with God being he
so that men had all the power on the ground
then they made their people’s minds fit the Christian mould
an’ they made a lot’ve boats to sail the seas
so they set to sail the seas in search of land an’ gold
to plunder other lands an’ never pay the fees
so they did an’ found the gold, an’ took our lands on the way
for that’s the evil sort’ve system we now know
an’ they came with hungry death an’ blooded silver as their pay
to rape our mother for a new nation to build an’ grow
an’ they took our tribal land rights ‘cause they said we wasn’t here
an’ the land grab was a killing thing with us against the flow
‘til they beat us an’ confined us and filled us full of fear
with a story of terra nullius we was crippled with nowhere else t’ go
it’s a lie we know for sure in it’s Christian sort of thing
‘an they educate themselves in the lies the priest has told
but they believe it as a glory from the spirit of their king
for his power is protected by the lies that came from old
now it’s easy enough to see, well it is to you an’ me
that the old men’s system has bled them dry
as we look they embrace it ‘cause it’s strong for them t’ be
an’ it gives them power over land they make to die
for the lie they still ignore is our terror with a price
a terra nullius sort’ve thing that can’t see black
for their embrace holds them tight as if it were a vice
an’ they believe it’s the only way to hold us back
for the thing that holds their thinking is a system made by them
like a bottle full of history an’ a story full’ve mud
for it hides their crimes against us to be sure we can’t condemn
their values of indulgence an’ the money smeared with blood
an’ it holds them to a cost beyond their minds of what they do
with endless rape of our great mother an’ the plunder of our lands
so yuh see bro they still educate they’re right in what they do
while they defend themselves against our cries an’ our demands
an’ they’re taking lots of our mob with ‘em as they climb their ivory tower
‘til together they’re like waves scrambling madly on the shoals
while we watch them jump an’ tumble for white money an’ its power
for this power gives ‘em status while the whitey’s own their souls
so there it is Ole Coe ‘an we know their greed won’t do ‘em good
for our great mother will take control in a sorry end
so we do what we do until our spirits are understood
for there’s no way we’re joining this mob ‘round the bend
we got a job that ain’t got space for the way these fellas head
it’s a picture don’t yuh reckon, with a sad and bitter show
an’ the devil these fellas pray to will come to claim the dead
but our Great Mother is the power that’ll take ‘em when they go.
yeah bro, it’s easy enough to see, well it is to you an’ me
why white fellas do their thing wrong way ‘round
but when their devil goes a running they’ll really come t’ see
the final price will be their end an’ no tears from us will flow.
so take heed ole coe that we do our thing in a strong an’ pure way
an’ we always live the way she made for us to grow
an’ hold no sorrow an’ shed no tears for the way they end their day
‘cause we told ‘em for two hundred years, but they didn’t wanna know.
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta
Note: Ole Coe – a vernacular from Aboriginal English meaning ‘old cove’, and evolved into general language during the early 1900s, and is still used today.
14 August 2016
Our Earth Mother cries when the nets are set adrift
They travel loosely and kill sea life as they go
Drifting in the moon-tides the grim reapers travel wide
Through tidal water homes of the all-life living free
To drift and pluck from the all-life every living thing
That shares the bloodlines of the all-life of our world
The nets drift on to kill like ghosts the fish can’t see
And plastic muck that people dump in seas so old
And the nets will drift and drift as if they really should
To spread and twist like floating shrouds to look for more
The birds and fish get tangled in monster webs
Made of twisted ropes and twine to make a deathly claw
Like silent ghosts their tentacles drift wherever they will go
Until the sea is struggling against this ever shifting wall
For nets keep on coming like spidery ghosts of sin
And we see them killing the most ancient life of all.
And so it is with ghost nets coming on our shores
Where island people use them to tell stories of the sea
With kelp and fibre string and flotsam jetsam as our stores
Telling stories of island life that talk respect for living free
Recycle and renew our strongest feelings of respect
For the sea and its life that sustains us from the brine
Our island life is a freedom with the sea that we protect
We leave our softest footprints in the golden sands of time
To be happy in connection of this wondrous living world
We walk the beaches to feel the sand crunch between our toes
Along we walk collecting shells and bull kelp come ashore
For telling stories and creating songs of islands that we know
And dance our stories in island festivals to celebrate it all
From islands north and islands south we tell you of our lore
As we watch the muttonbirds return to their island holes
And the turtles come in cycles done many times before
We string the stories from our island ways,
Stories of broken cycles that suffer as they die
From drifting human offal always there to prey
We tell stories about deadly ghost nets always floating by
Yet still we sniff the sea smells tainted with odorous death
While we weave grass string stories and shells from the shore
The spiral webs from coloured nets tied in with bull kelp leaf
And woven in many colours telling stories of the lore
Weaving our sea patterns like coral families made of string
With nets and kelp and woven spirals making stories come alive
Into the spirals of coral and kelp we make these stories sing
And weave from the things we find whenever they arrive
Through stories and bloodlines with the all-life of the sea
Feeling the water and smelling the essence coming on the breeze
Of crystal sands and timeless spaces ever they will be
And waterlines join our islands across waves of memories
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta
This was a visual arts collaboration between Eribus (Darnley Island) and Tasmanian Aboriginal artists using ‘ghost nets’ as the theme. I was the only writer participating. The result was an exhibition in the Tasmanian Museum and Arts Gallery courtyard in 2016.
Australians you now call yourselves,
You mongrel mob invaders.
You deny your blood mixed past
Yet think your blood has made ’s.
Come on fools and say your piece,
Your argument we know so well.
Ancestral lines for you are farce,
You dwell on genetics
And your bloodlines are our hell.
Of indigenous lines you fail.
And you come from countries over there,
With a heritage fairytale.
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta was born at Flinders Island, Tasmania in 1942. He is from the clan plangermairreenner of the Ben Lomond people, a clan of the Cape Portland nation in north-east Tasmania. His working life includes fifteen years at sea as a fisherman and merchant seaman, the Australian Regular Army for three years, and over fifty years formal involvement in the Aboriginal Struggle. He has a long history in the public service in Aboriginal Affairs, and has visited many remote Aboriginal communities across Australia. Jim began writing poetry at an early age. He wrote his first play, We Are Survivors, in 1984, and produced, directed, and acted in it. His written works now include plays, political and academic papers, and short stories. Jim has produced and been associate producer in many documentary films. He is published in many major anthologies. Jim lives on Cape Barren Island writing and maintaining involvement in cultural arts nationally.
Poems
A priest undoes his belt.
Twenty years later,
I compare his gentleness
to a Tibetan sky burial.
But there was only one vulture
skeletonising the cadaver
on a barren slope.
James Charlton
The failed money-fix of the 1980s:
dying tree plantations. Stark struts of fizzed-out financial hype.
The words ‘inherent value’ devolve into a distant dialect.
Yet some people retain three eyes.
They perceive the radiance of things.
Their eyes can tell you much within.
If they know the Australasian bittern,
or the pallid cuckoo’s elegant thievery,
they know beyond facts, words, concepts.
Who is it that hears behind the ear?
Who is it that sees behind the eye?
(Kena Upanishad 1:1)
Weather-washed limbs scramble down to a lagoon’s hem.
On this side, a thin beach of pink granite grits.
Wading bird wades with punctuation.
Sheep were here once, spread thinly.
Scatter of bones, cartridge cases,
beer bottles.
Always a conjunction of ending with beginning.
Sigh of water easing from somewhere
to somewhere. Stunted tea-trees,
fretted bark.
James Charlton
We invent the colour ‘blue’
and say the sky is blue.
An older language
sees everything
as sacrament.
Soggy Winter has become Spring’s fullness.
Pungent cascades of melaleuca:
frothy white, yellow, pink.
Do we feel small sounds
all around? A waft of midges
in sun-shafts; the just-here-ness
of lichen.
We participate in the weakness, in the power, of the Vast.|
Black-faced cuckoo-shrike tilts her head.
Resiny spinules of grass tree.
A tract of land becomes inner experience;
the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ dissolve in the dusk,
and come back
changed.
James Charlton
One who performs divination by dissecting faeces
We poke apart devil scats.
Clotted fur, bone fragments, gristle,
possible scraps of crushed mollusc.
Devils lope across roads less and less.
That which people called a growl
was possibly vernacular for ‘How?’
James Charlton
There is speech everywhere:
the inaudible conversation of orchids;
the quiet breathings of ironbark forest.
Birds bring energy from the sky.
A bronzewing murmurs a low OM.
She intones the OM alone, as we all must,
and clatters when she takes leave.
The OM attunes itself to inner ears;
the unfathomable OM
of the living, the dead, the light itself.
Black coffee of a still pool.
Mossies busy themselves.
Full blaze of Spring.
Crows do not announce their cleverness,
but caw with desolate caw.
So many throats precede our own.
This morning, scratchy intonations
of a butcherbird, still learning its name.
James Charlton
James Charlton graduated from the University of Tasmania, and from Flinders University and the University of Cambridge. He was Poetry Editor of Island magazine and Advisory Editor for Australasia of Chautauqua Literary Journal, published in upstate New York. Charlton earned his PhD from the University of Tasmania and his MA from the University of Cambridge. He is a poet and theological writer with an interest in transformative spiritual knowledge and experience, across traditions. His latest book, from Bloomsbury Publishing, is Non-dualism in Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Traherne (2012).
Poems
I step in a taxi, again. It takes me there fast,
cutting the white dotted lines of highway
into miles of silence. Back to my mother
in the ship or the plane, reversing my steps
to see her curving herself into her pillows
her red walls, her eyes not seeing me but a blur.
My mother calls to me from her place far away
in deep mind, where she has built a tower of knowing.
From her far tower, she can see the white gardens –
her Vita Sackville-West, the lighthouse, waves,
still far away enough for her
to remain in greenness, to inhabit
the green light of Pre-Raphaelites.
She can read the mind of clouds.
Anne Kellas
Here,
leafing through stone-quiet papers,
I freeze in the 8 am birdsong morning.
No fog-horn traffic noise or school-song children today,
just daffodils
pinned to spiked leaves
and sea light far away.
Anne Kellas
It’s dawn but it’s dark.
Winter. Your Winterreise
begins. But you don’t want to wake.
I tried to wake you but you wouldn’t, then you would.
If I knew then what I know now.
But there was the ticket, the passport.
Your father’s ready, names and numbers, labels on the luggage.
The car is idling outside.
It’s dawn but dark.
It’s winter here but summer where you’re going.
I’ve bought you coats and bags and clothes and phones
and all the usual clutter’s jammed and folded.
You turn back to sleep. No no, wake up I urge you
and you do.
Reluctantly you dress, foot-heavy. Swallow today’s pills.
What if I never see you again.
The thought occurs, but does not stay.
What if I were travelling too. I could but I don’t.
I’m your taxi. Fate’s unwitting Charon
your ferry
cross the Derwent
to deeper waters than you’ve ever known.
And then you’re gone. Your plane’s
a red dot slowly blinking in the sky.
Your brother and I drive home as blank as owls.
Your silence is everywhere around us.
Nothing’s left behind, except a woollen jumper.
I’ll post it to you. For Switzerland.
And so I buy a card – LIFE! is all it says.
But I lose it with my wallet.
When they’re found, I wrap LIFE! in the jumper.
– LIFE! could reach you in a week,
before you get to Europe. But it will be summer there.
And still I do not post it.
At a point of no return
small as an exclamation mark’s full stop
in Zurich’s Platzspitz Park
– cleaned up, almost, but not quite –
you punctuate your life.
And you don’t want to wake.
Anne Kellas
I’ll go that way, by sea,
in a ship that sails at night,
dropping life-boats,
like lifts down lift shafts,
onto storm seas below.
Anne Kellas
‘Ah, that layer of snow of which you tell me! For a long
time I too had it! But I turned it into the tablecloth my
wife spread over our – pleasantly round – table in order
to host ... so many incarnations of mud!’
Paul Celan (in an unsent letter to Rene Char, cited in Selections: Paul Celan,
ed. Pierre Joris, 2005, p.185).
1. First, you have to get rid of the layer of snow.
Observe it.
Apply your cooling-glasses to it.
The pebble ones, rounded at the edge.
The snow will fall off.
If it doesn’t, see 2.
2. Shoot the snow, scatter it.
With your pellet gun.
The shards will break up and mix with the grey.
3. Poetry’s not allowed to have ‘shards’ in it anymore.
(Ref. Twitter, yesterday.)
4. I know the layer of snow is still there
because I saw it overnight
in its pale dressing-gown.
Loitering.
5. I wanted to say ‘moon’ somewhere.
But the image would not fit with ‘a layer of snow’.
It’s hard to fit things to a two-dimensional
flat
surface.
6. When the layer of snow is gone
it will appeal to you.
‘Appeal’. Not pleading.
It will have a face as fresh
as a cloud.
I mean, child.
It will swim.
7. My Operas can’t Swim
(Manfred Jurgensen, via Val Vallis,
Brisbane flood, 1974, cf. Notes, p.79.)
Enough syllables per line/break?
8. As the layer of snow melts,
two things
or one of two things, will happen: your poems will get
shorter. No.
Your poems will get longer.
9. Once you’ve got rid of the layer of snow
you’ll be able to see your lyrical aura.
Then the circle will be complete.
10. You must, they say,
get rid of your lyrical aura.
Then you’ll be safe from the predatory black line
visible now the snow has melted.
Or perhaps,
safe from the predatory line break, visible now.
At least begin each line with a capital letter.
10. Write on the line.
And the thin black words will vanish.
Anne Kellas
A. E. Houseman memorably said: I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. It’s not an easy matter to justify one’s decisions when faced with numerous poems from which to make a limited selection. There’s no programmatic guide to what makes a poem successful although the impact of a good poem is something we all know and recognise. Generally it has something to do with registering a sense of shock – it might be the shock of the new, unexpected or strange, or it might be the shock of the familiar – it can take one off guard to be confronted by what one knows but didn’t know one knew. And what creates the shock? This is different with every poem. It may be linguistic – the relationship between the words or the acoustics of words and lines; it may be the imagery or information or impressions communicated; it may be the tensions and dynamics set up between all or some of these elements that results in a poetic imperative. The ineffable subtleties at work in a poem are endlessly unpredictable; it’s that unpredictability that makes poetry so compelling. You never know in what way a poem is going to reach you.
Not unexpectedly for an island known internationally, for its wildness, wilderness, and natural beauty, many of the Tasmanian poems submitted responded to nature in some way as is shown in a number of the selected poems.
James Charlton’s poems are a seamless continuation of the preoccupations of his two most recent books: So Much Light, a collection of poems, and his ambitious and absorbing work of ‘theopoetic’ philosophy titled Non-Dualism in Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Traherne (Bloomsbury). Mind, matter, the finite and the infinite are intermeshed in his poems and thinking:
A tract of land becomes inner experience/ the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ dissolve in the dusk, / and come back/ changed. (‘This’)
James Charlton makes an art of distillation of what is thought, observed or experienced. The diminutive scale of the final poem 'Choir Practise' belies the weight and thrust of its substance.
Anne Kellas’s new poems continue in the vein of her most recent book: The White Room Poems. ‘As You Left Home One Winter’s Night’ is an address to her son on the fateful night he leaves home for a journey from which he will not return. Her poems about her son’s death are a synthesis of fragility and strength, I read these poems with wonder and admiration that poetry could be born of such pain. Stylistically Anne Kellas moves effortlessly between the surreal or disembodied and the meticulous rendering of realism and quotidian detail as she freeze-frames moments of emotional experience.
Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta is an Aboriginal Elder, spokesman, writer, and activist who lives on Cape Barren Island. His poems range from the metaphorical and cadenced line (as in ‘Ghost Nets’ and ‘Waterlines’) to confronting and didactic ballads whose strength and intensity lie in the vernacular of the narrative voice. These are affecting, unvarnished poems about Aboriginal culture and spirituality placed in the context of colonial and environmental history and politics; they are passionate and angry rejoinders to the impact of the past and to the blithe views of many non-Aboriginal Tasmanians which continue in the present.
Gina Mercer has published four collections of poetry that span the social, political, domestic, and, more recently, natural world. These new poems illustrate her characteristic literary verve and eschewing of the predictable. There’s often levity and irreverence present in her work, even in the deeply serious, for example, in the poem about her sister’s death: ‘After, There are the Birds’. Technical sleight of hand is evidence of the honing of craft over a long period. Her penetrating eye often opts for the skewed angle rather the straight line.
Ben Walter is the youngest writer in this selection. He is an accomplished author of ‘lyrical and experimental’ fiction as well as poetry. His recent book: A Guide to Bushwalking in Tasmania transfers a bushwalking guide into novelistic form. The poems in this selection imaginatively inhabit the landscape their author inhabits physically; language in these poems embodies the elemental and metaphysical in nature at times giving voice to the landscape itself. He is adept at the understated lyric aphorism such as:
Well, / rules drift out with tides,
‘Four Limpets’
Christiane Conésa-Bostock was born in France. She has the uncommon and enviable status of being a poet in more than one language. Her poems selected here are part of an enigmatic sequence about the life and art of Claude Monet. In these poems, through multiple points of view, she brings new light to images that many of us may have thought familiar, creating her own rather dream-like world through these ekphrastic works.
Peter Rose and ABR are to be thanked for establishing the States of Poetry series. There has been no precedent I can think of for this opportunity to view, through the luxurious lens of numbers of poems, samples of the current work being written in each state. I wish the enterprise well and hope it continues into the future.
Anne Kellas’s third collection – The White Room Poems (Walleah Press, 2015) – was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary awards. Written with the support of an Australia Council grant, it also received a Blue Giraffe Press poetry award. Isolated States, supported by an Arts Tasmania grant, was published by Tim Thorne’s Cornford Press (2001), while Poems from Mt Moono (1989) was published in South Africa. The Netted Air appeared in early 2018 in Ginninderra’s Picaro Poets series. Anne’s 2017 Masters by research degree drew on her work in youth studies (as Anne Hugo) and covers similar territory to The White Room Poems.
Poems
'How To Get Rid Of The Layer Of Snow'
