"This malady is difficult to pin down", our friend Robert begins, before launching into a series of quotes and paraphrases (mostly at the expense of the immensely overrated poet Jorie Graham). He ends it all (pretty much) with this little gem from an equally jaded cultural commentator by the name of Greg Kuzma: "Workshop poems are about nothing much at all except maybe the problem of their own existence".
Sage words, if perhaps a little harsh considering the legion of bug-eyed hopefuls armed with all the best intentions in the world (except, perhaps, much patience with the aforementioned world). Corner-cutting is what I call it, a mortal fear of living out your time, but then I'm the sort who prefers chronic back pain to the pained smiles of a yoga class.
The book in question, however, is North American. Their terms, their history. They tried phonetic and failed. They tried dodging the bullets of world wars and failed. They have tried spreading their take on civilisation and failed. They are a delusional people. A literal people with esoteric aspirations. They are a nation of poets, as Lorca well knew (and now also marketing and sales). Always an accident waiting to happen.
We Aussies, on the other hand, know better. Our history has no age of chivalry. We were born among corpses, a fact our landscape never lets us forget. Against the North American bluster all we have is the asinine drone through teeth clenched against a storm of flies. As narrow as it is, I am taking this line for a reason.
The North Americans are very good at fighting amongst themselves. The poets in this book strike me for the most part as refugees from such storms-in-a-teacup:
If words were dust,
I could scrape from the walls
all the terms of love
and abuse I know.
…
I'd rather look for the reborn star,
feel the cool gain in the night
black now in the west,
turn back into the room,
spread a clean cloth
put the meal on the table.
(Kieran Finnane from "Consider this Living Room")
Flying in the face of Robert Peters' gripe against such collectives, this is considered, ancient, deeply felt poetry. I expected less, of course, as that is my nature. In her very heartfelt introduction, Jan Owen gushes: "These are spacious, honest poems, full of vitality, often open to humour, and generous in the trust of the reader". I agree on all points bar the humour, as these, if not exactly deadly earnest poems in the best American "workshop" tradition, are nonetheless dense with living:
We follow tracks
as if we grew up here
point out honeyant hills
to our son
"See, that little one's the head"
our dreams, his dreaming
sunny flowers against red humps of rock
that peel off in plates
with swirls of quartz
candleholders once
now I have them to step on
in my garden.
We turn off into the mulga
a clearing becomes a circle of firelight
trees closing in.
His swag on one side, mine on the other
our son snuggled up to the flames.
This isn't so hard, I think.
Later I lie in my swag
my son burrowed against me
cars from all the camps
cough and roar off to the concert
purr in the distance,
the sounds of these people
my people
like the hum of my parents' conversation
as I went to sleep as a child.
(Meg Mooney - "Return to honeyant dreaming")
Maybe the group "workshopped" those last two lines or maybe they didn't. I have already taken them out and put them back in twice and reckon that's where I'd leave them. There are a few poems in this collection that are really victim of nothing worse than their own strength of purpose. None strike this overly pedantic, very-Sydney reader as overwrought, nor would I pick most of them as being Central Australian, let alone regional, poems.
In the din of my country
- cock crows, cries from the market
- a million bicycle bells -
- neighbours' names,
- fathers', mothers', childrens' names
- fill our ears.
When bad luck comes
we can't pretend
we don't know.
(Kieran Finnane from "Good Luck Song")
Far from simply agonising over the problems "of their own existence" these poems and poets live and die by every word, full of mixed feelings when something takes flight just as the silence seemed leaden.
"Living Room" is a clever title, a national obsession that many of us have given up for lost. But the writers in this collection have refused for a myriad of reasons to join the huddle. Some were born in the Alice, but many have landed there, either running towards something or running away from it, and their poems vary in tone accordingly. Though mixed, this is an impressive collection, and bodes well for the future of Australian writing, regional or otherwise. I reckon our jaded friend Robert Peters would find something to celebrate out there in the desert.
(Reviewed by Justin Lowe, June 2007)
