The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 2
The anthology this year opens with an emblematic poem by the late poet Martin Harrison, ‘Patio’, from his stunning last book, Happiness: just as the patio itself serves as entryway to the house, so Harrison’s poem is the entry point to the past year’s poems. As well as being one of our finest poets, scholars and environmentalists, Harrison was an indefatigable mentor and teacher to many of the poets in this anthology, and I encourage those readers and admirers of his work to seek out the edition of Plumwood Mountain, guest edited by Stuart Cooke and Peter Minter, dedicated to his memory. ‘Patio’ is, among other things, an entreaty to remember our capacity for wonder in the face of so much darkness – a fitting inclusion from a poet who brought wonder and delight to so many of his readers and fellow writers.
Bookending the collection this year is an arresting last poem by Billy Marshall Stoneking, another generous mentor and vital member of the Australian poetry community, who passed away during the parentheses of this anthology’s timeframe. Stoneking was a poet, playwright, scriptwriter and producer who had a keen interest in Indigenous issues since he first arrived in Australia in the 1970s, and spent an extended period of time living in the Papunya Aboriginal Settlement, where he helped found a literacy program to empower local Luritja and Pintupi peoples to read and write their own languages. His haunting ‘One Last Poem’ speaks to his enduring interest in language preservation in the Northern Territory; it is a poem that gave me chills when I discovered it, and I know it will do the same for readers of this anthology.
This past year, the Australian poetry community also lost Dimitris Tsaloumas, a brilliant and humane poet whose work I have loved for as long as I have been a reader of Australian poetry. There have been many wonderful tributes to him by those who knew him best, including Vrasidas Karalis in the Sydney Review of Books, Helen Nickas in Australian Poetry Journal and Antigone Kefala in Rochford Street Review; these essays speak not only to his superb poetry but also to his seminal work in translation and the way in which his writing, while always highly regarded by peers and critics, has been somewhat neglected due to his position as a poet of the Greek diaspora; as Nickas writes, ‘Tsaloumas remained largely an outsider in Australia.’ This neglect does a great disservice to his exceptional body of poems; I am sure that future generations of readers, poets and critics will return to his oeuvre and see his extraordinary contribution to Australian literature.
Due to his ailing health, Tsaloumas was unable to write in his last years, which is why I could not represent him within the pages of this anthology with a recent poem. Instead, he will have the last say of this introduction, via lines from one of his best-loved poems, ‘Note With Interlude From the Banks of The Brisbane in September’, first published in his classic volume Falcon Drinking. The poem begins with the poet sitting beside a ‘fawn-thick’ Brisbane River that ‘gifts a city with loveliness’, prompting him to enter into a fantasia about ‘days of happiness’ with the hetaerae of Ancient Greece: a reverie brought about by a sudden visitation of poetry, of ‘words come forth again, / unfathomable, out of yellow-paged time’. Here, Tsaloumas writes about the ways in which the poet’s work – punctuated by delight and exuberance – is ultimately fleeting for the poet, beginning and ending in doubt. He reminds us, too, of the great gift poets leave behind for their readers, of the treasury of their enduring works. Tsaloumas, Stoneking and Harrison were all fine, original, necessary poets whose works reverberate with the concerns of their time; while their vital works and voices will endure, we will miss them in the years to come.
I write because
this ache gets sharper with the years
and my truth is but a husk of substance
wasted, my strength no longer adequate
to breast the song of the rock-bound sisters.
My message is this: in the old cupboard
in the wall, beside the mirror
opposite the bed, you’ll find some papers
held in a roll with string:
please burn them. Youthful,
possibly happy stuff, I can’t recall –
things one could redeem perhaps
in leaner times, but burn them nonetheless.
This has been preying on my mind of late,
but if I am to end this journey at all
it’ll have to be as I began, expecting nothing.
Sarah Holland-Batt
* Dougan, Lucy and Zwicky, Fay. “Plain Speech: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journals.” Axon: Creative Explorations 5.2 (Nov 2015)
Patio
At any moment
any slice or gash,
a huge explosion falling
in any direction –
outside the window
a swatch of bladed leaves
sways this way that way
inside the frame:
wordless day bounces
down the tree’s bare limbs,
through its outspread flamboyance
toward twigs and wattle-birds
while they maraud sticky cream flowers
as if beauty could be instantly
sucked from the world.
Directly. Without irony.
Martin Harrison
Black Winged Stilts
Two long, plaited, clouds of cotton-wool fog
Roll across exposed mudflats as tide runs in.
Morning sunlight bleeds an opaque water
Coloured script onto the tide— it sets loose
A word I discovered once in a poem
On Black Hawk Island: ‘condensare’.
Scatterings of black winged stilts fly in
To make a landing on the bay. They are taller
Than the early spoonbills, royal ones,
A river’s vanishing poets. The stilts slowly
Step forward, up to their bright pink knees in mud,
Spearing a crunchy breakfast as they go.
The black winged stilts keep a quick eye
On a lone human with a camera aimed at them.
Pictures dissolve, let’s say images should
Disappear, like the poetry of birds—before
We invent a language for the final entry, before
The need for a sleek soul and a slim presence.
A black winged stilt is a loaded bow,
It’s needle beak, the arrow. Lorine Niedecker
Called her writing room ‘this condensery’
And said her trade was to sit at a desk and condense.
This occurred a while back, these days poets
Learn to muddy the page and expand.
Gathering bullhead memories in a seine net
The heaviest break through the mesh.
A mangrove tree at the end of the mind is draped
With her father’s net, caught thoughts
Fade as slime dries in the sun. Minutes ago,
A line ago, the black winged stilts were wading,
Gathering spoonbill poems, yabbies, soldier crabs.
The birds have flown, taken their poems
Neatly tucked into a book, Judith Wright’s ‘Birds’
Forget the vanishing poets. Breathe life
Into hollow bones, take heart in backwater craft.
Carry language, a mullet’s leaping joy, on your breath:
I have come to believe the black winged stilts
Carry knowledge of their particular death.
Robert Adamson
In The Billy Sing Baghdad Bar-and-Grill
I’d heard the director didn’t need an Asian to play him,
young Billy Sing, Gallipoli’s finest sniper.
After all our Kylie could play a geisha.
His Dad was a drover from Shanghai,
his mother Mary-Ann from Staffordshire.
Proud member, model minority hard
working, civil, didn’t do anger or shout,
no doctor had to fix his face.
Essentially Us, a little whitewash
with a good spotter – a novel
ist.
Productive, liked good roast duck fried rice.
Could have met my ancestor, the Captain
who rode in the cavalry, sold beer,
was mayor of the city staffed with his progeny.
Strengths? At Gallipoli Sing bowled a long spell
under mortar bombardment.
Billie Sing shooting Turks by the hundreds,
brave but hardly suicidal –
no North Korean human wave bullshit,
the Bravery column balanced the Common Sense column.
Why give away your position?
Weaknesses: Sang-froid? Myalgia?
Who needs to know in the Billy Sing
Baghdad Bar-and-Grill.
Adam Aitken
—this light exists —that dark
divides —death clouds into —Euclidean
space & locally —compacts I
love you —therefore the lemma
may —may not be true
this flame which burns this
lamp which shines the logical
constant in your eyes &
linear truth that “light exists”
I cannot confirm this proof
Jordie Albiston
Advanced Souvlaki
A kookaburra sits on the cage
at the top of the rusty stinkpole
with a neckless air of gravity.
A man with a spirit level trips.
The grandad caravan with its crown
of loudspeakers is back from Darwin.
If the question is still, What’s the point
of anything at all? there’s nothing
left to start to make an answer from.
Behind the cluttered yard that will be
three dark garage spaces for crickets
to stridulate in, a cottage squats.
The dead man’s fingers are red in claw.
Pizza and scandalized reaction
are proffered in a mini-playground
with a massive sandstone portico.
It should have been abundantly clear
for some time now that you’re with stupid.
It’s the conference of the currawongs;
no ambulance can interrupt it.
Two fresh-faced Euro-canvassers tread
the narrow path to the hoarder’s door.
In front of the gutted shop that was
Advanced Souvlaki, a rubber kid
tries his rabona kick on a stone
and ¡GOL! I can’t fault those arguments
to justify despair. You know that.
Chris Andrews
Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal
Above his desk it is written:
‘I wish I knew the names of all the birds.’
I know this room through tessellation of leaf and branch,
wurahŋ-bil and jaran-gir,
in the shade of a kulsetsi—
(Cherokee) ‘honey locust’ [a flowering tree].
I am relearning these hills and saltwaters
and all the places wrapped around this room
We both have dagahral here,
lovers/fathers/friends/conquerors/
ghosts.
But here, in this new and ancient place,
I ask him to name the song that swoops through this mosaic:
Sometimes it is wattlebird sometimes it is currawong—
when we drive, he tells me king parrot, fairy wren, black
cockatoo
and I know jalwahn and bilin bilin and ngarehr
but the rest are just nunganybil,
the rest are just: ‘bird’
It is hard to unlearn a language:
to unspeak the empire,
to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape,
a topographic intonation.
So in this place the shape of my place
I am trying to sing like hill and saltwater,
to use old words from an old country that I have never walked
on:
bundjalung jagum ngai, nganduwal nyuyaya,
and god, I don’t even know
if I’m saying it right.
But I watch the bark twist:
grey and slate and vanilla and vermillion
he tells me this is ribbon gum—
so I find five words for this bark
and I promise I will learn them all
Because to hold him is to hold the tree
that holds these birds I cannot name,
and a word spoken here
might almost sound like home.
We are relearning this place through poetry:
I open my book and say, wayan,
here is a word which means road, but also root
and in it I am rooted, earthed,
singing between two lands
I learn that balun is both river and milky way,
and that he is baray-gir, the youngest child
and the top of the tree,
where the gahr will come to rest—
to call its own name
across the canopy,
long after his word for it
is gone.
Evelyn Araluen
A Panegyric for Toads
These slum-lords of burrows and tree-hollows
are on the move, dozens of pulsing lung-sacs
‘a little ventriloquism of ducks’ singing in the spring.
Folklore says the toad’s a shape-shifter — rancour,
and primeval trouble in its head, devil-worship
on its tongue, its third eye-lid perpetually wiping
away the sight of ghosts. A toad will leave a glaze
of poison on your hand, but you can forgive
it for this — look at those copper-red eyes leasing
fire to the damp core of evening; listen to their calls
in the reeds like the low-plucked strings of ouds;
and how, sometimes, as if led by an unseen conductor,
sensing peril, the singing instantaneously stops.
At first their mating will look like a congregational
laying on of hands, whose purpose, you could
think, is not to spawn, but to heal their warts.
Some say toads are always belching, breaking
wind, eating each other’s shed skin, but I’d happily
kiss a toad on her sombre, gargoylean mouth,
follow her gawky walk to the slime-scented pond
where she must climb over a thick layer
of frog-spawn, and scrumming indissolubly
with a group of males, an iron-lock embrace
they won’t break for days, risk drowning for sex.
Unlike frogs, loaded with the rapid taut and release
of sling-shot legs, toads like us, must land-walk,
eat with short tongues, bull their way across earth.
Judith Beveridge
Dark Heart
I look in here—this
notebook—& see
the notes for the
last review I did,
& note—that I am
about to write another.
Tho I would rather
write something else.
I whistle bop a bit
try not to think
of the vast tide of crap
the exhibition represents,
check the sky: sere,
grey, pale up one end
of the street,
almost Neapolitan
at the other
(pale, but a distinct
blue, some
dark smudged stain
drifting over it,
much closer to
than the far blue
behind—blown,
in those paintings,
from a volcano
somewhere at hand—
almost like flak
in the old movies.
(Goya’s
mantilla, & parasol—
& the rumour,
nothing lasts)
#
It makes the
sky darker too
an atmosphere
not a backdrop
#
a small figure
further down
Hindley Street
is crossing the road—
I recognize the coat
as much as the figure—
but who?
#
It is about time
I had a drink with Crab.
About time for a
lot of things.
What to do
about this art?
I whistle
‘You’re My Thrill’
the beginning
—but, whistling it,
I end up,
as always, with
the ‘Perry Mason Theme’
(I think)
(it is
so long since I have
heard it)
Instantly recognisable
when I was a kid.
I thought I
didn’t like it—
now it seems I do
or something
cousin to it.
‘You’re My Thrill’.
Then
‘Couldn’t It Be You’—
I wonder
what the
connection is —
the key, the pattern,
somehow relates?
Its calming effect
when whistled.
So,
resignation,
‘getting on
with things’.
Hate to turn
a beautiful tune
into a tic, a
neurotic response
tho again, luckily,
it is only the
first few bars
I remember
this way,
the rest of the song
is safe,
unretrievable.
When I play it
I smile.
This art then,
what to do about it?
Inflated in scale,
naive, ‘done’ when
its theme is recognised
— like logos
for a moral