A huge lost looking spermatazoa and a tiny warped love-heart. There is not much love in this book. The photograph of the poet shows her nude, perched artfully atop an old commode, obviously posed. Her expression is one of either abject terror, or the result of ill-fitting contact lenses, either way, she is baring almost all.
Morgan-Shae basically writes in three forms, the confessional (Revolving, Transformation) in which she talks about her ex-lovers and her wardrobe; the song (Witchkind, Angels, Where I Grew Up) in which she recalls her personal story; and the snap-rhyme (Popsical poem, Love Trash) where we hear about the way-bad times.
Through the poems, we discover that she is posed. She is a model. She adopts a pose. That is the strength and the weakness of these poems. Is there any of the real Ashlley Morgan-Shae in here?
For the most part, the poems are little more than catalogues of ex-lovers, "Making Marks, Clown Town" and her wardrobe - there is a heavy emphasis on dress "Glad Rags, Synthetics". The poem "Collecting" shows the poet's penchant, obsession with collecting. She is a serial consumer, always wanting one more ex-lover, old dress, bit of tat. She wants trophies, but the lovers don't leave her anything of themselves but memories. The ex, Ron, left her so little that she had to create relics herself. She tells us early in the piece that she chooses her lovers for "their ability in bed" in "Making Marks" and that she has a system for determining the size of a potential lover's equipment "Theory of dicks" yet none of them prove satisfactory for long.
The poet offers explanations for her addictive, self-obsessed behaviours in poems like "In Violate Town" and "Where I grew up", but the most revealing lines come in the poem "I had a heart", where she loves and loses,
"... my heart rolled
out - a steaming hump of black ash."
It's sad, and like all these poems, beautifully constructed in a posed way.
I really wished that this book had come with an Ashlley Morgan-Shae press-out doll and sheets of outfits ready to be folded on to it. Some of the outfits do sound perfect for this kind of play.
Too many of the poems in this collection are self-referential and tell the same story again and again, "Harry the Hat", "The Eccentrics". It's not that the poems themselves have anything wrong with them, but the effect they produce together is disappointing. It's reminiscent of the way Ken Bolton's poems always seem to include his friends, lovers, enthusiasms.
This collection of poems leaves me with the feeling that the poet is a Miss Haversham character; surrounded by her own dismal past she is unable to let other people be unaffected by her. I did not find the voice in these poems engaging - in fact, I grew thoroughly tired of the lovers, the clothes, the everpresent smell of mothballs. There is no doubt that Ashlley Morgan-Shae is a voice in the Melbourne poetry reading scene, but I would like to see a bit more development on the page, less repetition, the development of an interesting poetic vocabulary and a lot less self indulgence.
(Reviewed by MML Bliss, September 2003)
