Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #11/thyla11f-phbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
In The Year of Our Lord Slaughter's Children by Philip Hammial
(Island Press Co-operative, Woodford, NSW, Australia, 2003, ISBN: 0-909771-66-9, $17.95)
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In the year of our Lord slaughter's children has received overwhelmingly good reviews. Philip Hammial has been likened to a poetic Dadaist, a Surrealist, a primitivist, and even an "Art Brut" practitioner; critics using words to describe his work that are even more obscure and complicated than the poems themselves. Influences like Shaminism, voodoo, modernism, montage, ideogrammic, parataxis, and even atomism have been ascribed to his poetry. It isn't hard to see why Hammial has been so heavily lauded. His work clearly demonstrates a command of language which is tight, full of clever linguistic puns, strong imagery and attractively visual abstractions. |
Viewed from a purely experimental context, and treated solely for its role in changing the nature of what we expect our poetry to do, Hammial's poetry works well. It doesn't much matter if it makes sense, so long as we can make out a strong shape amongst the verbiage: "Mouth on red alert./In formaldehyde, black withered:/an oracle's tongue" ("Yao," 57) There are lines which stand out as powerful in themselves, such as the humorous: "Flailing about/in this swamp where the insolvency of imagery/has reached epidemic proportions, it's time/to either abdicate or stand & deliver…" ("Seraglio," 31)
Call me old fashioned, but I don't believe that strong imagery, experimental door opening, deconstruction, and exquisite language are enough. Poetry has to add up to some kind of meaning, however, oblique or subtle. The poems in this collection are almost entirely submerged, as if the reader were plunged into the chaos of someone else's nightmare. We can recognise some of the images but have no idea of the meaning. The reader feels, while reading this work, as if he or she has been plunged into a Lewis Carroll like Jabberwocky world, where language has lost its ability to signify:
from speech arising), which leaves (3) (& more's
the pity) the equivocations of the scandalized
sultan as the oftener that oscillates the practice
of bowling them over even as they pledge the same
in kind, to row no matter what. ("Canoe Practice," 29)
Much of the book follows the same pattern, leaving the world of the meaning for random image generation, visual moments of beauty, and a lot of what appear to be highly personal references. There is sibilance, onomatopoeia, incantation, and certainly rhythm. The poems sound lush read outloud, and individual lines have the power to stay with you, and even to evoke a kind of sensual impact: "at The Couple's Club, it's/caution to the wind as we wade into a sea of bodies/writhing like serpents, apparently alive." ("Laocoon Revisited," 28)
It may be possible to read some of the poems as a kind of chaotic (often overlapping) trip through brutal history as the work picks up imagery like the "killing floor," occupying armies from "Mogadishu, Kabul, Kakata, Maputo, Dagestan, Burundi, Belfast, Beirut, Berlin," ("Curtain Calls," 13), black slave child labour, Vietnam, the Balkin war, or war in general: "Salute/often. Duty brawls. Home town/by gosh & other irrelevancies as we sprawl/on a verge, violated, as vulnerable as virgins…("Vox Populi," 35).
Some of the poems seem to function as travel diaries. "Laocoon Revised," "Nairobi," "Absinthe," or "Passion Play" all conjure specific places and times, with imagery and irony to match. Even in these seemingly transparent poems however, there are references to people, places, signs, and experiences which remain securely outside of the grasp of the reader. The metaphors are so heavily mixed, and the scenes move so rapidly from one terrain to another that as soon as the reader feels like they've begun to penetrate the poem, it moves elsewhere:
Junkies who spank make a difference.
As does Nick Brown in his pee-stained underwear
taking the sun on the fifth floor balcony
of the Miami Hilton. From which something -
séance ectoplasm? -- is spilling over into
everyday life, whatever that is, which in any case
unfolds on a sweet-smelling meadow where two
tattooed punks emerge from the cockpit of a biplane
to welcome us aboard.("Soft Targets," 33)
Other poems may be making wry political comments, such as "Crowd Control," which may be about the horrors of war:
GP, if memory serves that's where
What's-his-name?--Eli English--did
His dirty: disembodied the machine
For listening: spit & sputter
Followed by silence, a bugle boy
Gone horribly wrong in blue.(43)
In a similar vein, "Taxidermy" make a clever criticism of the phoney-ness of politicians, although it takes rather a long time to get to its punch line: "As the politician is already stuffed & on display, any/attempt at taxidermy would constitute an exercise in/ redundancy." (65). "Grand Guignol," takes on "Little John," who "uncovers a golden cage in Parliament." (though Alieu remains an enigmatic character), and "Detour," seems to suggest that politicians don't have time to worry about the people they govern:
feed a family
for a year? -- forget it, we've got better things to do
in our little time left: perfect, for a start,
our skill at coinage…(74)
There are so many good lines scattered throughout this book, such as "as redundant as the fifth wheel/on our Coupe de Ville" ("Detour," 74) or "In reality the one with the air of auricular insouciance/is just another pampered oracle working on her legend ("How we hear often lies," 34), but the poems never seem to come together towards coherency.
Of course poetry doesn't have to (and maybe shouldn't) be polemic, nor am I suggesting that it needs a strong, plain message, only that it has to make some sense, otherwise it is just random imagery. In the year of our Lord slaughter's children reminds me of Allen Ginsberg on his harmonium, shouting out lines which sound great from a distance. It is all delivered with the most compelling auricular insouciance, but when looked at closely, just doesn't seem to mean anything. Because the writing in In the year of our Lord slaughter's children is so assured, the linguistic skills so developed, and the imagery so sharp, the reader keeps hoping for: "a passion play/that will thrust, as the curtain falls, you & yours into Clarity.) ("Passion Play," 24) But clarity is the one, and perhaps only, thing that these poems lack. Unfortunately it's critical. Without clarity of meaning, the poetry amounts to no more than a series of experimental abstractions, which leave the reader with nothing.
(Reviewed by Magdalena Ball, June 2006)
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Thylazine No.11 (June, 2006) | |
