McDermott talks about taking the skin off things: a dangerous occupation if your target is 'an echidna disturbed - only spikes showing'. The oddity of this work, beginning with the bizarre first poem 'Kinky One', lies in its truthfulness - almost a confessional search for identity through vast layers of social subterfuge and personal misapprehension:
Gone gender-tipped, yet dug-in
like an echidna disturbed -
only spikes showing - a big boy
emerges, nights, to forage verandah dark
for the milkman's promise, steals
lacy glimpses, learns to love to watch.
McDermott's poems address a fundamental failure to acknowledge an obvious Aboriginality: 'The family tree turns out a stringy-bark: trunk bare/ of slow-peeled protection' (from 'Scrap Heap'). For example, in another poem he recounts a childhood story in which his sister wins the Sydney Eisted-ford, a first for an Aboriginal, and how his mother (Dorothy/Doss) denies her daughter's Aboriginality and forces the newspapers to change their 'page three story'. Doss's denial, which envelopes the poet's childhood, compels the adult McDermott to re-address colonial attitudes beside the White Australian middle-class culture in which he is raised. And he does this without the usual black/white antagonism though he doesn't pretend to admire Francis Bacon - 'I'm certainly no Bacon butter white meat' ('The British Exhibit') - rather, his writing insists upon recognising those layers of being and doing (including tourism, art and music) which have displaced the man and his family.
The collection is set out in three parts. The first part is confused and disjointed, clearly indicating a state of mind desiring release from a life of meaninglessness and persecution. 'Fairy Mushroom Season' is a disturbing poem from this sequence. His sense of place is evocative but the confessional mode, appearing as the psychologist's discussion (analysis), reveals someone displaced by someone else's story (his partner's). This 'other' story is encountered in the last two parts of the collection but, with tremendous skill, McDermott announces that this story is simply a further colouring of his own, a poisoning of the atmosphere in which he is trying to find a place for himself in the world.
McDermott admits that the psychologist always falls short of the mark in trying to identify the problem at the root of his own feelings of displacement but, he must confront these things before he can move on with his life. So, throughout the first section of Dorothy's Skin there is a nagging contention with feelings of belonging which is set against the temporary comfort zone of the Blue Mountains listening to the blues, as suggested in 'Late Night Brubeck':
I walk home through mist
and stars and music, through country just like me:
a hide for temporary water.
This musical interlude (also with 'Debussy and the rain falling') returns McDermott to the site of childhood memory, setting up the obvious challenges to identity and invention the book has set into motion. The difficulty with revealing one's identity lends itself to a complex wit edged with razor sharp metaphors for cultural erasure - 'this culture knits with wire' ('The British Exhibit'). Every now and then McDermott shifts his view, to powerful effect: 'apart from mixed-up children/ no one ever took anything/ away' ('Page Three Story').
The collection's second part, simply titled 'Court', concerns McDermott's working life as a psychologist. His reader is asked to question why he might be persecuted by his employer for entering into a sexual relationship with a client. McDermott's poems add layer and layer of meaning, until we discover that this relationship only became a possibility after his client/counsellor relation had ended. But he inquires further into the persecution and, following an appearance in the Work Relations Tribunal, realises that part of the discrimination is grounded in the fact that he is over fifty and his girl-friend is twenty three. On this level, McDermott finds no release from earlier feelings of discomfort and he turns to travel ('the up train') in order to break from the reality which has confined him for most of his adult life.
This last section, 'the up train', is more expansive than the first two sections. The narrative is stronger and there's a feeling of observation and recording akin to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which the reader as passenger might find interesting. At this point, the reader will realise that the book has also been invested with another layer of meaning, from the local, to the national, to the international. Without a sense of prescriptiveness, McDermott's analysis of life post-September 11 is illuminating:
the two rectangles to the right of Wall Street, if you
scan the skyline like a tourist, as I did, a year or so before
from the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, fell,
floor by floor, person by person,
kept falling in perpetual replay on the news promos
till they stopped somewhere behind my eyes, waiting
to be dragged forward by the next low-flying plane.
The journey, for both McDermott and his partner, is full of personal distances and silences. 'There was always need of a passport/ to tame a sense of transgression.' And, as with Pirsig's novel, the trip over the Rockies and into California brings the relationship to a head. For McDermott, the mist which enveloped him in the Blue Mountains has lifted in California. He and his partner have a chance to be themselves with some liberal-minded people who understand what they have been through to get where they are.
The trip home brings McDermott into contact with his family and the recognition of an Aboriginal identity. His travels through NSW reflect a broader appreciation for the social: a cultivation of identity. In Dorothy's Skin, McDermott discusses how his family might have related to Oodgeroo Noonuccal (aka Kath Walker), and, in this last section, McDermott reflects upon his own self-descriptive use of the term 'Aboriginal'.
This review of Dorothy's Skin suggests a dangerous complexity but it is a complexity that is accessible to the reader. I have a contention with the over-use of prose poetry but, in McDermott's case, the poetry is tempered by its length (only 62 pages) and by an effective break from structure (McDermott does not cant, nor fall into rhyming meter, though the poems retain an easy-reading rhythm - they flow extremely well). There are quite a few political and environmental poems in this collection, and these (on their own) are worth the purchase.
The value of McDermott's writing lies in his sophisticated appreciation of sound, for the tonality of places often interrupted by the noise of living things. His fascination for birds can be observed in the clever poem 'The Chainsaw Trick', in which a lyrebird constantly re-constructs the sounds of the bush being levelled by the timber industry, and in the poem 'Mudgee Wine': 'I feel the room open to an unseen bird. More birds,/ build lines, send cadences in circles'. These poems describe an almost totemic presence, the significance of sounds that cannot be reproduced simply by the mechanics of the imagination but through a process of adaptive 'tuning in' to environment. And it is towards this end that the powerful 'The Bowerbird' poem moves - the re-construction in nature of one's appreciation of place in the light of change. These values are laced, without ambiguity, with the idea that it is the past which requires catching up with, not the future, as witnessed in his later poem 'In The Flames': 'The world that changed forever, the world/ that would never be the same, never was'.
(Reviewed by Richard Hillman, September 2004)
