Changing Trains for Misty Mountains

The train trip from Hakuba to Takayama involves four or was it six changes but it's the kind of trip that Kipling must have meant when he said the joy was in the journey and not the arrival.  Most of the scenes seen by train window flash past like a dream occasionally a mountain, this one being case in point, stays around just long enough, like mist to be spooled into the little traveller.

Fitting Lights for Melbourne Cafs

Five days in Melbourne, lurking around South Yarra and Prahran, means coffee and cafes to find in the morning, The Final Step, a sweet little diversion on Murphy Street, swung in with looped cords and these lamp lights, while Mitte, North Fitz, had tiny cages to catch incandescents, while outside the sun, not to be beat, turned the leaves chlorophyllically green.

Plenteous Water Night

Naturally it was raining, a dense blue-green pixels on the bom, a hissy fit of water on the street. Still, we made it out for ramen at Tanpopo, and following a discussion about the work 'plenteous', enquired politely what our waiter, the affable Winnie, thought of the term 'plenteous water'. She smiled and returned with two containers for my paintbrush. This is the first time I've ordered, albeit accidentally, water for a painting, and yes, it was plenteous.

Launch Speech for Benjamin Dodd’s' Regulator '

For some reason, a little mysteriously considering its confidence Benjamin Dodd asked David Musgrave to ask me if I would launch Regulator, Dodd’s first book.  After reading Regulator, I can say I am privileged to get in the first sound bite in on this collection. Oddly, or really not so oddly, I worked for a long time in Chemical Regulation so launching Regulator seems singularly apt. 

'Regulator', the title poem, gives an insight into Dodd’s modus operandi, one might say his regulatory approach, where what starts off as an acute point of observation, with the precise words, an exacting image , but as things go on, the duplicity, the ambiguities, the metaphoric qualities, the innuendos, start to add up so, while we start off at the scary point of a dam spill way with its gates and concentrated surge of water, a heavy duty playground for young men, the  action of jumping off seems as much a method of regulating excess testosterone, as writing it also becomes a way of regulating the past.

These poems are discretely loaded with revelation; there is a perversely biblical strand from the start.

Thinning our little herd

For weeks

we had Baskerville

hounds in our heads

sweeping bold arcs

through feathered darkness

at the porch light’s circle edge.

My father’s too-long absence

and the distortion

of farm-night acoustics

surely exaggerated their size

but the rigid carnage we’d find

stitched to the morning’s frozen

grass did little to lessen unease.

A man who was not our father

barked stark instruction

at my brother and me:

foolproof steps

for burning a gutted calf.

In ‘Thinning our little herd’ we get the Hounds of the Baskerville with an edgy twist, a man barks, orders,  blood on the ground,  a prodigal father  and a calf , not fattened by gutted. By strangely inverting elements in the New Testament, Dodd gives the disturbing scene both a resonance and clarity, and at least for me a dark comedic take.

Its hard to put your figure on why but perhaps the unseen and unmentioned idea of Basil Rathbone invoked by the Baskervilles, or the very dry line breaks, so ‘foolproof steps’ come across as anything but.  He laminates b-grade horror with biblical chutzpah, with a nearly casual and economic micro tales.

The unsparing perception of country life brings to mind Philip Hodgkins, though their motivation is different they both have a blistering acuity. Dodds continually reminds us that life if often bizarre, we most often blinker it out, Regulator brings it all back into focus. 

Dodd had a sure grip on his mixed media vernacular,  with touch points in 'Day of the Trifids's.  'Boys Own', 'Twisties' and 'Letona,'  Bambi peppered with an integrated and casual  literary chutzpah,  sometimes combing the two to recognise a Lord of the Rings tragic reciting ‘ impervious to the snagging bramble of almost impossible consonant clusters’ in Lounge 22.

One of the recurrent themes in this collection is metamorphosis, of rock, of creatures, alive and dead. Most particularly so in Host, where he does a reverse Kafka. It’s only recently that, reading Kafka in Spanish, that I realised Kafka is funny, it is English that renders him dour.  But the poem, Host, with its inversion of metamorphosis where a part of the narrator turns out to be, well, for those who haven’t read it I’m not going to be a spoiler here.  I will say I needed more than a moment to resettle myself when I’d read this. 

The collection is littered with knifes, sharp edges, broken glass, one can literally say these are cutting edge poems, where everyday life is a little jagged , a baited trap waiting for the unwary.  The remedy is close by, and you might see these as work, in one sense as, cautionary tales,   a Maxwell Smart guide as to what not to do.  Where we see in ‘Man at Home’

there’s prudence too

in placing the eager edge

of a can’s excised lid

inside the empty thing itself

instead of the way I’ve dropped it

keen curve up

beside the jagged glass.

One thing I particularly like in this collection is the way it celebrates men, from a male perspective, in here we have  coming of age poems, without slushy romance, and see that there is nothing really casual about casual sex. They give a vivid and honest vicarious sense, an evocation of the tension of finding one’s sexuality without losing one’s sense of humour, whihc is so well done in poems like 'Water Tower'.

These poems are mercifully free of piousness, there is no straining here for the lyrical parsnip, no obfuscation, no death by Language, no false humility, but it not what I might say is the negative capability of these poems, but for what they are, finely written, witty and lucid accounts of coming of age and living in Australia, that I recommend this book for your reading.

Carol Jenkins 23 February 2014

Where the light gets through

A steel panel, perforated for building work, loitered for a few days between the sun and an adjacent wall, throwing into light relief its apertures gaps and overlays. The edge of the panel, as a shadow line,  is nowhere to be seen, creating a mystery of why the object which caste this pattern,  was so scant of interest to me, while the vacant spaces were, suggests what isn't there can be more intriguing than what is.

Quince Essentials - Breakfast at Copernicus

Sunday breakfast at Copernicus, a cafe sometimes anagramatically  called Open Circus, I spot these louche fruit taking it easy in the corner., it might be said they have a ring-side seat. The quince, the essential autumn fruit, I suspect is waiting for an arranged marriage with some duck, the pile of pineapples most likely pining for a smooth liaison with mint and that watermelon. Bravo says the BRAT (bacon, rocket,avocado and tomato), my standing order.

You can find Copernicus' lovely Open Circus in Gouldsworth Street, Mosman.