But it is as a poet that we encounter him here. And though the cover design of this book certainly features a chess set (with some innovative stray images, like an angel and a sharp-looking bird that could be a honeyeater, or a flesh-eating shrike) I did not feel, reading the poems themselves, that I had to know my chess moves in order to enjoy the lyrical moves and the undeniable lilt of them.
Admittedly, the opening poem is called 'Rhetoric'. But it relies on what is not said, more than what we normally associate with the conventions of 'rhetoric':
Plato also spoke in solemn tones
About the Godhead principle:
That's how Christ was propped
For favour under the cedar
Shade of Calvary -
To save us from ourselves;
But Rhetoric
Rang on regardless -
Sometimes for work
Sometimes for leisure -
Her hunch to bow
For no-one's pleasure.
Denis McMahon is now (and has been for many years) a West Australian poet and this handsomely produced book asks to be picked up and read. The paper is a creamy semi-gloss which resists glare, and the binding is solid and the whole effect elegant. I did have a small problem, however, when I discovered some of the last pages were printed upside-down. You might just check your copy, if you are buying.
McMahon's poetry is, essentially, lyrical and celebrative with a bit of gruffness to keep it off the rails, and a bit of sweetness to carry you in whatever direction the poet wishes you to go. It begins with poems that have an Irish sort of loneliness:
Butterflies
I woke to the sound of my father's weeping -
A wind blew in
Through an open window
As I watched
Our cocoons crack
And the honeylife juice seep out.
It was because of my mother
and we were caterpillars
worsening the pain of our own creation.
It was harder and thicker than death
And we were bending
Under the weight of it.
It was because my mother
Had closed up her wings
And was weaving a clock
For the love of another -
That I woke to the sound of my father's weeping.
Poems for a daughter bring out the song in him:
Reassurance
My daughter wakes at three a.m.,
Come to give me details of her dream-
How many rats there were,
How scared she was to see them
Coming through the floor.
She has a wide-eyed
Head for gore at three a.m.
I go to cradle her
To sleep. Before I can, she's snoring-
Remembers nothing by morning.
Separated parents in his youth, however, continue to haunt and fester. Their shadow falls over much of the book, more, possibly, than the author himself intends. Although these are essentially domestic poems, about the experience of living, family and contacts, there are also poems which take these things (I was going to say 'these musings') to a more metaphysical level, and some of these are quite haunting:
Magical Poetics
Language herself walks freely
In the nonchalance of hands -
I stare from the littoral -
Dreaming how water and sands
Take on this shape of prayer.
Magical words - Isthmus, Invocation -
Are conjuring the whirling sky -
Observed by us as lightning.
I ask the face of landscape: why,
If there are books enough?
The sands run through my fingers:
Clouds sing, what the winds have gathered:
You will build a tower
On the grave of your Beloved.
You will raise her up from Babylon.
The shadow of Yeats still falls, but in these poems there is just enough grit to open the oyster.
When I was living in Perth for a time in the very late 1970s, the Irish cadences of the poet Alan Alexander seemed to be everywhere, and begorrah, it is a beguiling accent certainly. I have never heard Denis McMahon speak, and, okay, he was born in Broken Hill, but for the life of me, I still hear a sort of Celtic lilt in these poems. Is it my imagination? Or is it an almost instinctive choice, something about lyricism in its wholehearted sense, no dodging around with cut-up prose or incantatory pile-ups of words and phrases? McMahon's rhetoric is both more obvious and more subtle.
(Reviewed by Thomas Shapcott, March 2004)
