Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #12/thyla12f-ksbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
Litmus by Kerry Scuffins
(Five Islands Press, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2006, ISBN 0734036523, $19.95)
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This is Kerry Scuffins' sixth collection since the late 1980s; more playful than her previous, often dark, poetic visions, this poetry recalls joy, camaraderie, family affection, a country town childhood, and the joys of motherhood. Scuffins has never been afraid to unflinchingly represent the real world of Australia's bars and streets, and her astute eye provides honest portraits of flawed humanity - its chaos, its pathos, and its irony. I laughed out loud at 'The Aussie Nicknames Poem' (p.22), which hilariously lists dozens of barroom nicknames, (all real people), creating a rhythmic tribute to characters called 'Squiggles', 'Wombat' and 'Tugger'. |
While she notes that there are few women in this exclusive nickname club, the poem bears the hallmarks of great amusement, and also great affection, for this type of Aussie bloke who, while appearing tough, happily takes on ironic, childish monikers. 'Two Reds and a Blue with Cheryl' (p.20) is in the vernacular of a country boy who 'shot me girlfriend in the leg on me eighteenth birthday'. 'Lost our Marbles' (p.15) honours a friend who was killed by a train, and imagines Marbles' amusement at his grieving friends' deification of him in the pub as a 'philosopher and a prophet', when the poet knows that 'if you did walk in the door now / and asked for twenty bucks / to buy some beer / then we would hear / a minute's / silence'.
In 'Jilly Mack' (p.13), Scuffins unflinchingly describes the life and speech rhythms of a woman destined to die young, her life a maze of drugs, booze and domestic violence. But Scuffins' Jilly is no victim; she has chosen her life ('... why cry / when you can laugh and get blind?') and the poet's compassion is mixed with wry amusement at this woman who survives and thrives amid chaos. In 'Tony's Test' (p.46), a psychotic friend admits to lying on his Rorschach test, telling the doctors the 'Archangels in Hell' he really saw in the ink blot was really just 'a small marsupial crossing a river'. It is the poet who hears the truth in the pub later, not the doctor who holds power over his out-of-control patient's future.
'Period' (p.27), in eighteen short parts, would have to be the funniest menstruation poem ever written, mixing adolescent memories of visits from 'Fred' with barroom jokes ('Why can you never trust a women? / Who else bleeds for five days and doesn't die?'), and remarking on the odd menstrual synchronicity that exists between sisters, even though they're separated by thousands of miles. Similarly, most poet's cat poems are forgettable and verging on the sentimental, but not so in Scuffins' 'The Green Dream (Kizzy's Poem)' (p.59), describing the effects of the loss of a seventeen year old cat on each member of the grieving family. One would have to have a heart of stone not to relate to the stark realism of the final lines: 'Tracked grave dirt all over the house / in our big boots, bawling and / drinking beer. Bye, Kizzy, / bye old dear'.
Of her immediate family, Scuffins draws unforgettable portraits: of a head nurse mother who is devastated at the loss of an Aboriginal patient who had caused her nothing but grief while alive ('Charlie Long and my mum' - p.17); of a brother whose commitment to wildlife conservation sees him building a tepee, rehabilitating raptors, and playing 'the nicest [pantomime] Big Bad Wolf / in the world' in an effort to teach children that 'Wolves are much maligned!' ('My brother's tepee', p.18); of falling in love with a new sister-in-law's 'shining aura' on her wedding day ('Talia shone', p.19).
Those familiar with the poet's previous work would remember 'The Second Month of Spring', an award-winning poem that has appeared in several collections and is one of the most heartbreaking descriptions of the loss of a full-term baby ever penned. This knowledge of the poet's previous poems about childbirth adds to the joy of the poems that appear here, which deal with the pregnancy, birth, and early years of the poet's adored young son, Tom. 'Babyland' (p.50), with its babies' words and scattered food, has much in common with Sylvia Plath's word-thick babylove poem 'You're'. Where it differs is that in Scuffins' poem the child's perspective is equally as important as the mother's, and his voice is as present as the poet's, while the poet's voice contains the same wonder as the child's: 'That's me in the mirror, hi. / There I am Tommy. / There's Tommy. / There's Mummy. Bye now, bye', and 'Games and delights / for me! His wonder as he learns / to run, to sing, that a leaf / can shake a tree'. This is uninhibited poetry that celebrates life's beauty, and the wonder and unpredictability a child's perspective can add to a life.
There's nothing overly clever about this work; Scuffins seeks to communicate, not to impress, and the poems jump off the page with the power of their vernacular. This makes them excellent candidates for oral presentation. Scuffins has in the past been labelled a 'performance poet', a label that these days is frequently used perjoratively, but it is no small task to produce work that suits both methods of transmission equally, and the poems' orality in no way detracts from their power on the page. Bruce Dawe, who rarely reviews other people's poetry, similarly represents Australian speech and rhythms in his own work, and he was much taken with this collection, describing Scuffins as 'a true poet of the people', whose poems 'beg to be read aloud' and 'enrich our seeing, and our hearing, and feeling'. In this reader's opinion, the best poetry engages emotion as well as intellect, leaving in its wake a reflective and vivid insight, enlivened by its crafted rhythms. By this criteria, Kerry Scuffins' Litmus is a terrific book, and its author deserves to be credited as one of Australia's best living poets.
(Reviewed by Liz Hall-Downs, June 2007)
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Thylazine No.12 (June, 2007) | |
