Jennifer Maiden’s Fox Petition finds human comedy in politics

In her 20th book, Jennifer Maiden again trials her imaginative de-extinctions through reawakening voices from history.

From the cover of The Fox Petition by Jennifer Maiden.

In her erudite yet rather magical poetic art, Jennifer Maiden is always avoiding pitfalls and traps. For instance, the title of her new collection, The Fox Petition, refers to her ‘‘favourite politician of all time’’, Charles James Fox, the 18th-century British Whig parliamentarian and anti-slavery campaigner.

However, Maiden employs Fox’s name not only as a moral benchmark for the explicitly political dramatis personae of her poetry but also as a resonating pun on current obsessions with biosecurity, with what does and doesn’t constitute vermin in Australia and, by implication, on the treatment of ‘‘non-nationals’’, or refugees.

This is Maiden’s fourth volume in as many years, and her 20th overall, and once again she trials her own imaginative de-extinctions through reawakening voices from history. This she does both to lampoon and to provide reference points for an amnesiac political sphere in which cultural inheritance is either denied or manifested unconsciously.

Queen Victoria woke up crossly in Canberra,

Where Tony Abbott had just survived

A possible leadership spill. His heart

Beat instantly with spilled ecstasy

Of which religion had robbed him, at

Her impossible return but he knew

It boded ill, as her eyes

Were tougher than Credlin’s and deeper

With experience and despair. ‘I’m sorry,

Ma’am, about the Duke of Edinburgh. I

Wouldn’t usurp your power, but you’d gone.’

This is a characteristically purgatorial Maiden dialogue, reminiscent of Dante and in its caustic wit also of British poet Peter Reading. Such playful casting across eras acts like a dredge, as Maiden exposes a kind of sedimentary mythology still at work in our otherwise commodified, and therefore garbled, political sphere. In the poem Orchards she does this by zeroing in on biographical details, to allow for the emotional force of personal symbolism.

In this case it is the clothing of Julie Bishop and Melissa Parke during their administrations of humanitarian tragedies. Both these politicians’ parents owned orchards, Parke’s an apple orchard, Bishop’s a cherry orchard, and by noticing that their crisis-clothes specifically imitate the colours of these formative plantings, Maiden manages to propose, in only a few brief lines, a subliminal vestige of the authentically humane in contemporary politics.

Thus these women are made real in the hands of a highly evolved artist who is in­terested in, but incapable of resorting to, the usual armatures of political journalism.

When she met the Christians Bishop had         ­arrested

For protesting detention of refugees, Parke

Wore a coat like apple blossom: pink,

white and green, translucently. Bishop

on the day the Bali two were transferred

to the death island wore a dress

the colour of cherry blossom, dark pink,

looked gaunt with anxiety

Orchards alludes not to the kind of marketable ‘‘human touch’’ you might find on the television show Kitchen Cabinet but to territories of the human psyche that our beholden media most often only simulates. In the hands of a poet all acts of grief will find their symbolic resonance, be it conscious or unconscious. Maiden gives Parke and Bishop back their humanity in Orchards while raising questions about their ­degree of self-knowledge. Thus she takes no sides and hints once again at deeper currents quietly brimming within the ulterior modes of the parliamentary and media environment.

She continues that work in Uses of the Female Duet, where Tanya Plibersek and Bishop, on either side of the parliamentary table, are decolonised from the usual cadences of Lateline or Insiders, this time by the poet’s cultural literacy. Thus they are reset within an idiosyncratic but more enlightening canon of female duets: most ringingly with Rosa Ponselle and Marion Telva singing the duet from Bellini’s Norma.

By the end of this fascinating poem we realise that despite its casual surface the gender politics of our parliament has been eviscerated by a unique commentator, while our parliamentary figures have been simultaneously ridiculed and given the personal tang that apparently we are all crying out for.

As always, Maiden uses her own invented characters, too, to dilate and observe the attenuation of ethics in the political sphere. One can imagine which side of the current political ­debate Maiden is on, left of left perhaps, but it is far more useful to point out the continuing vigilance she maintains in notating the mercurial psyches of trauma, dislocation, and the institutionalisation of violence. So her fictional characters George Jefferies and Clare Collins, who first appeared in her 1990 novel Play With Knives, and who work as observers for Amnesty International in global hot spots, are themselves far from simplistic moral arbiters.

In The Fox Petition we find George and Clare on the Greek island of Kos, where they observe the crisis of refugees washing up on post-mythological shores and the psycho-geographical chaos that ensues. The premonitory aspect of her treatment of this ongoing scenario is proof both of her talent for intuiting possible scenarios of the geopolitical sphere and of that sphere’s often slow-mo predictability to the astute and independent observer.

Either way the ironies in this poem can’t help but be compelling.

There is always a hard coolness to the shape of Maiden’s thoughts, but it is enriched by her novelistic skills of narrative and characterisation, and the occasional comfort of rhyme. She also intercepts the newsiness of her own content with an ambiguous yet jet-black wit. Pericles is thus employed to comment on the magnetism of Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s stray cats are sent home to Australia for vicarious protection and desexing, while the refugees themselves remain just out of sight, on a desperate and petitioning fringe.

In Maiden’s world we are all far from salutary creatures. And yet creatures we remain, full of mystique, televised or otherwise. In a sense we are all vermin aspiring to some pedigree we are too distracted, or damaged, to properly recall. Our democratic inheritance is as ostracised from us as any so-called introduced species. This is the human comedy Maiden continues to stage in The Fox Petition, an ongoing drama of otherness and not-quite-belonging in which the skin is both perimeter and mask, the fox punished in lieu of our own self knowledge.

Gregory Day’s latest novel is Archipelago of Souls.

The Fox Petition

By Jennifer Maiden

Giramondo, 96pp, $24