Review: Of memory and furniture by Bron Bateman

Before we go any further, this is one of the best titles that I have seen for a while: it resonates right through to the end. A killer blow.

Australian poet Bron Bateman's latest collection develops through 4 parts and is described as exploring "experiences of female embodiment, sexuality, and relationships with family, lovers and institutions...concerned with expressions of female sexuality in its myriad forms – heterosexual, lesbian, and experiences of non-normative sexuality – as well as issues of maternal subjectivity, mental health and abuse and, throughout, the role of memory in enabling healing."

This is a collection that has a whole ecosystem of vividly realised friends, encounters and locations that ground and validate its often intense bodily and sexual language from the dedications to many of the poems in Part 1 to its lovers, family and transactions through to demeaning medical interventions. The poems' sequence is knitted together with motifs especially blood and piercings to the body. For adornment for example in the poem bars-

you could hang chandeliers from
these he says eyes half-closed
taking my right nipple between
his thumb...[]
I watch him redesign my body in his head.
we can pierce you here...

And pleasure - the intense Needle Play - to the painful self blame transfixing the sense of self in one of the brutal and self-healing concluding poems of part 4 Talisman:

be less serious not think I was a cut above use big words be so sensitive if I were special he would not have dared."

Everything that life throws at the poet in the end can be spoken and makes her voice and sense of self stronger. This is a collection that doesn't shrink from naming the casual diminishing sexism of institutions but also the power of healing available in situations that the poet's sensibility controls - even against what might appear to be the odds. For example in the poem Language

Either my blood, or my baby's.
Never mind, he'll say, his back to me, they're a dime a dozen.
Meaning miscarriages.
This is my first.

Later in the same poem:
I tell him. Tie me up all you like. I'm still a feminist.

The cuts are balanced by a lush sensuality of language and experience which are at times breath-taking; from the opening lines of the same poem,

At twenty, I have: my first child,
bruising, soft and black as summer plums...

to the loving "loll and sway of her thighs" in Catching up and hungry joy for example in PDAs

...I've searched and failed to find a word that adequately
describes the texture of your thighs,
or that my mouth against you
reminded of the peach I ate yesterday, its
tender fuzz against my lips...

The poems build to an understanding of sexual, body image and physical control and naming in the context of past life experience for the reader; glimpsed in poems such as shape of a girl that transforms a submissive sexual role into the powerful place inhabited by subs:

the longing to open your lips
feel the shape and weight
of that word
in your mouth

A visceral recasting of life experience of immense strength, this collection reclaims a body space long overlooked. A gift that repays study. You can find out more about Bron Bateman here @BronBateman and order the book here from @FremantlePress.

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Cover is also very pleasing but no credit discoverable.

Absent stuff

Well apologies for the quiet. But maybe you liked it. I have been away working in Prague and reading Lorca but not at the same time. Both were fun. But back in the groove again. It is hot here and I am waiting for a gigantic rainstorm to arrive. Also have been waiting for an even longer time to get my head around a grouping or collection of poems and it looks like that might also arrive in a downpour.

And with regard to the quiet I suppose losing a parent takes a bit of getting used to.

In the meantime here are some stars from the Alhambra bathhouse.

And a poem by Lorca...

A Irene García

(criada)

En el soto,
los alamillos bailan
uno con otro.
Y el arbolé,
con sus cuatro hojitas,
baila también.

¡Irene!
Luego vendrán las lluvias
y las nieves.
Baila sobre lo verde.

Sobre lo verde, verde,
que te acompaño yo.

¡Ay cómo corre el agua!
¡Ay mi corazón!

En el soto,
los alamillos bailan
uno con otro.
Y el arbolé,
con sus cuatro hojitas,
baila también.

*

To Irene García [a man needs a maid?]

In the thicket
the little poplar trees dance
with one another.
And that tree
with four little leaves
also dances.

Irene
The rains must come
and the snows.
Dance on the green!

On the green green
I go with you.

[howl] How the water runs
[howl] Oh my heart

In the thicket
the little poplar trees dance
with one another.
And that tree
with four little leaves
dances also.

This is my rather free translation - but I have fallen in love with this poem from Lorca's Canciones likely written sometime between 1921 and 1924.

The reticence of Elizabeth Bishop

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop was notoriously possessive of her work refusing to give up poems even when solicited by editors. Katherine White wrote to her in 1955 "As usual this letter is a plea to let us see some of the Elizabeth Bishop manuscripts that I feel certain are all on your desk, all finished if only you could bring yourself to part with them."

Bishop is a rule unto herself. And you can find the unpublished work in the Carcanet book Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-box (out of print) and judge whether she was right or wrong.

Yet the store of riches when a poem is all complete and ready to go is to all of us almost a drug: that feeling of the work in progress or something good about to come. But sometimes a visit to an editor for poems even if rejected with no comment loosens up something unexpected. And the poem gets richer and better as a result.

A poem is never finished only abandoned Paul Valéry

Yeats' life as a woman

Yeats' Crazy Jane avatar appears in poems ranging from the late 1920s until his very last collected work. She is literally a descent. Naughty (what's the difference between a solid man and a coxcomb?), sexy and maybe mad; and he puts her through it.

She can says things he can't say.

Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I.

'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,

Those veins must soon be dry;

Live in a heavenly mansion,

Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,' I cried.

'My friends are gone, but that's a truth

Nor grave nor bed denied,

Learned in bodily lowliness

And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.' 

Machine poets: the movement of small things

I think it is the marimba music that I find so infuriating about my favourite Elizabeth Bishop poem The Bight. And of course the last line, its diminishing feminine ending as we used to call it in college.

As a poem, it is its transformative quality I love best; the quay that repels water it is so dry, the unwet water, the reality (and poetic unreality) of its evaporation. And this is underpinned by the machinery of the bight, actual, sponge boats and dredgers, and imagined: the boats become anxious retriever dogs eager for a word of praise, the dredger has a “jawful of marl” while the workaday shark fins for the restaurant trade hung out on chicken wire to dry become plow-shares, the pelicans are pickaxes hitting the water "unnecessarily hard". One imagines a hangover might have been part of this particular creative process. And indeed the pelicans are "rarely coming up with anything to show for it”.

There are no people but the poet.

And under it all, "the dry perfectly off-beat claves" of the dredger tie the whole into a maddening music, Baudelaire's music no less, and this line on occasions makes me want to hit Bishop over the head with a hammer. What are the old correspondences that lie like broken boats? And why that last line like a nervous nod of the head, “awful but cheerful” (said with an American accent what can awful mean? It reminds me of John Wayne in the Greatest Story ever told asked to do his line as the centurion with more awe, and saying "Aw, surely this man was the son of god.") The poem is left high and dry like the beach flotsam and jetsam, Bishop can do that; withdraw from the poem and leave it resonating like the dredger for the sixty five years or so since she started it on her 37th birthday in 1948.

The Bight

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,

the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,

it seems to me, like pickaxes,

rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

and going off with humorous elbowings.

Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

on impalpable drafts

and open their tails like scissors on the curves

or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

with the obliging air of retrievers,

bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

where, glinting like little plowshares,

the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,

like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

Elizabeth Bishop

Ghazal primer

A ghazal is a love song originally Persian that deals in love gone bad, star-crossed lovers, separation (and sometimes the pleasures of drinking in such circumstances). A little bit of the courtly love troubadour. It can be dedicated to a man or a woman. In essence, a ghazal is an articulation of  the agony of loss or separation but love's beauty in spite of that pain.

In its strictest form, the ghazal has:

·         5 or more couplets.

·         Each couplet's second line uses the same word or phrase ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, so a ghazal's rhyme scheme is aa ba ca and so on.

·         Lines must be complete in themselves.

·         The poem maintains its metre throughout.

·         Each couplet is complete in itself but a theme can run throughout the ghazal.

·         Sometimes the poet namechecks him or herself (in the last couplet).

 Well-known examples can be found in many languages and in the works of Muhammad Iqbal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Hardy, Adrienne Rich and W.S Merwin. Orhan Parmuk's work The museum of innocence (2009) might be considered a prose ghazal.

Here is a rather happy version from Mimi Khalvati which you can also listen to  here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=5140. An altogether more painful but less formulaic version by Federico Garcia Lorca can be found here. Gacela is the Spanish for ghazal, if you prefer to hear it sung http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQo8mOh6AHc

  Gacela del amor desesperado

La noche no quiere venir

para que tú no vengas

ni yo pueda ir.

La noche no quiere venir

pero yo iré

aunque un sol de alacranes me coma la sien,

pero tú vendrás

con la lengua quemada por lluvia de sal.

El día no quiere venir

para que tú no vengas

ni yo pueda ir.

El dia no, no quiere venir

pero yo iré

entregando a los sapos mi mordido clavel,

pero tú vendrás

por las turbias cloacas de la oscuridad.

Ni la noche ni el día quieren venir

para que por ti muera

y tú mueras por mí,

para que tú mueras por mí...

Ni la noche ni el día quieren venir

para que por ti muera

y tú mueras por mí,

para que tú mueras por mí,

para que yo muera por ti...