‘Marked with blood, and the cost of exploration’: poems for the West
Western Australia-based Caitlin Maling takes inspiration from Randolph Stow in her work
Seamus Heaney’s great long poem, Station Island, which dramatises the poet’s purgatorial quest to find an original voice by travelling through a landscape populated by the ghosts of his poetic forebears, ends with a fictional encounter with the greatest Irish writer of all, James Joyce.
Heaney and Joyce walk together in the driving rain as Joyce, in the role of Virgil to Heaney’s Dante, counsels the poet to “let go, let fly, forget … strike your note”. “You’ve listened long enough,” Joyce advises Heaney. “It’s time to swim / out on your own and fill the element / with signatures on your own frequency, / echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, // elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.”
This idea of striking one’s own note “in the dark of the whole sea” is an enduring ideal for poets. The quest for poetic originality, however, is always knotted up with the question of influence.
All poetry is, after all, a conversation between the living and the dead: a chain of influences and echoes, a history of salvos and responses. We would never have had Catullus without first having Sappho, Chaucer without Dante, Keats without Milton, Heaney without Yeats, and so forth. All poets are indebted to those who’ve come before them, those who have shaped the language they use, sometimes even altered or added to it. How to find an original note in a sea of echoes?
Critics have often imagined the poet’s tussle with prior influences as combative: most famously, Harold Bloom used the metaphor of “breaking the vessels” to describe a poet’s need to violently renounce his or her predecessors so as to achieve originality. But Heaney’s Station Island shows us that this conundrum can be reconciled in a more conciliatory way: as a conversation.
This week’s poet, Western Australia-based Caitlin Maling, stages a similarly fruitful encounter with one of her literary forebears, Randolph Stow, in Fish Song (Fremantle Press), her third book of poetry.
Maling has lived in Australia and the US, where she undertook graduate study in Texas at the University of Houston, and her poetry bears the influences of Australian and American rhythms and cadences.
Her most recent collection, Border Crossings, was oriented more towards the US, and written while the poet was living there. Fish Song, by contrast, is located firmly in Fremantle, and tracks her return to her home state to be with family as cancer, “some small deadly thing”, advances in her father’s body.
Maling’s poems in Fish Song are direct, vernacular and autobiographical, and trace the textures of a landscape that seem fresh to the poet after years living overseas. She memorably observes the “charred thighs / ritually sauced” on a barbecue, roadkill making a street look “like a dirty old flyswatter after Christmas”, a slab of concrete heralding “a future servo”, and men in parking lots fighting “for beer-goggle Helens”, with a piercing and unromantic gaze.
Alongside the roadkill, other deaths rack up in Maling’s landscapes: there are the men lost at sea, a wedgetail eagles hunted by boys with shotguns, a crow that “falls from the wire / like a bride’s bouquet”, a carpet snake killed with an axe, and prawns in a bucket flicking “their bodies at the plastic — insistent / little thwacks of life”.
Most frequently, these deaths are wrought by humans, whether through incidental or deliberate violence: the ever-present fish of the book’s title, for instance, are figured as both sustenance for the fishermen who populate the landscape, but also under threat from overfishing and pollution.
As with Maling’s last collection, migration, borders and belonging also feature heavily in Fish Song, including a poem that approaches these ideas from a slant angle, through the Asian swimmer crab, an introduced pest in Australian waters, “paperweight-heavy / with marbled purple”, whose plight evokes the plight of “people / shifting between nation and nationless”.
Yet while Maling’s landscapes are relentlessly attuned to the present, they are also aware of the literary strata of the past, especially the visions of Stow, one of WA’s great writers and poets, whose interest in the injustices perpetrated by Australian colonialism at home and in Papua and New Guinea resonate with Maling’s interest in migration and asylum-seeker issues.
Maling also appears to be influenced by Stow’s rendering of the sea, which, as John Kinsella writes in his introduction to the superb The Land’s Meaning: New and Selected Poems of Randolph Stow (Fremantle Press), is “marked with blood, literal and mythological, and the cost of exploration, of commercial and nationalistic empire-building”: themes that also recur in Maling’s poetry.
At the heart of Maling’s Fish Song is a sequence of four poems responding to Stow: a poetic conversation of the kind Heaney has with his fictional Joyce. In this week’s poem, Calenture, Maling responds directly to Stow’s The Calenture. Her poem can stand on its own if you don’t know the Stow, but the correspondences and conversation between the two poems deepen your understanding if you do.
The word calenture, dating back to the 16th century, refers to a now-debunked delirium supposedly experienced by heatstroke-afflicted sailors in the tropics, who flung themselves into the sea’s waves, mistaking them for rolling grassy meadows.
The speaker of Stow’s The Calenture is a becalmed sailor who seems to be the last alive on his doomed expedition, dreaming of “hymning shade” in the “stagnant noon” as “natives” camp on the boat’s hatches.
Stow’s sailor hallucinates that he is surrounded by grass, “fields so fair and deceitful”, before insisting that he can retain his common sense by reminding himself “continually of the ocean”. “I am not deceived,” Stow’s sailor declares desperately towards the poem’s close, “by the waving grass”.
In my reading, Stow’s poem is a portrait of the damaging delusions of colonialism, where explorers insist on imposing their own order on a foreign landscape, refusing to see it as it is, and insisting on their own alternative vision.
Maling’s response to Stow’s poem is to flip this conceit on its head; her vision of calenture occurs not at sea but on the parched WA land, as the poet drives through the vast “burnished pastures on the edge of summer” on a “dead calm day”.
The poet’s car replaces Stow’s vessel, and ferries her through the landscape at “one hundred km/h”. As she drives, Maling’s vision of waves are forged by agricultural fields: “the last tassels of crops / upright and waving”, “an ocean of grass dotted with cows” and “silent sheaths of corn”, which the poet imagines herself being drowned in: an inversion of the ocean that threatens Stow’s fever-bound sailor.
The answer to the stasis of the dry fields is “to keep moving”, the poet suggests, and closes with a beautiful image of “breath passing / mouth to mouth with the stuttering certainty of windmills”: a figure, perhaps, for the gift of poetic influence handed down from one poet of the WA landscape to the next.
Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and an associate professor at the school of creative practice at the Queensland University of Technology. Poet’s Voice receives sponsorship from The Copyright Agency and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. She can be contacted at sarah.hollandbatt@qut.edu.au. Regular poetry submissions to The Weekend Australian should be emailed to poetry@theaustralian.com.au.
*****
Calenture
Burnished pastures on the edge of summer,
towns on the edge of obscurity and ends of roads,
of rivers, beds run rust and dry. Drive one way
and you hit mountains, and to the other: sea,
and the young gathered like a seam between shore and sky.
Today no cities, no galleries, just the picture frame
of a car window, the last tassels of crops
upright and waving, a paddock full of roos
driven out by yesterday’s storms. At one hundred km/h
I breathe slower, a passenger, a tourist on the verge
of speech, the tractors parked, the sun splitting paint from us all,
half-ovals of clouds evenly spaced in every direction
above an ocean of grass dotted with cows, silent.
The wheels turning like spokes in space,
fire and rain forgotten. Still, like balance or emptiness,
a dead calm day, an exhalation of a day,
feet never touching ground, fingers only the plastic
of the dashboard, I wish to be embalmed by light,
or drowned in the silent sheaths of corn
but to keep moving, an engine in a constant state
between fire and air, almost like breath passing
mouth to mouth with the stuttering certainty of windmills.
Caitlin Maling
*****
Stephen Romei
A Pair of Ragged Claws
As Sarah Holland-Batt’s Poet’s Voice column shows us each week, Australian poetry is thriving. Today I want to recommend a collection I know Sarah plans to review soon: Jaya Savige’s Change Machine (UQP, 107pp, $24.99). Sydney-born, Queensland-raised, London-based Savige is this newspaper’s poetry editor. I will leave the poetic probing to the brilliant SHB, but I want to let all readers know that this is a magnificent book. It is so intelligent, so funny, so sad at times, so human.
When reading poetry, I like to go to the title poem first. I know Jaya is nervous about calling this book Change Machine. For what it’s worth, I think it’s perfect, with its multiple meanings thrumming through the collection. The title poem involves, in a nutshell, the poet needing to use the toilets at London’s Waterloo Station. To do so he has to break a note and drop a coin into the slot in the turnstile, which then “clicks like a bottle- / nose dolphin at a killer whale. (Go on, get in.)” That image is inspired. I immediately read the poem to my 15-year-old son. Who is the Orca? we wondered. Is it the poet?
There’s a similarly striking image in a poem with a title that is part Japanese, part French. The English translation is Pac-Man Studies. It’s about some boys playing a Pac-Man machine at the local shop. “For a stack of platypus at the corner store, / Pac-Man was our Minotaur.” It took me a little while to work out that stack of platypus and even then I, in this cashless age, had to Google images of our 20c coin for confirmation. That line will never leave me. It is genius.
It also reminds me of two things.
First, Jaya, who is 42, is a bit younger than I am. I well remember going to the local milk bar with my friends and having to buy a penny from the woman who ran it so we could put it in the machine that dispensed all-day gobstoppers. That the Pac-Man poem returns me to that time is lovely.
Second, Jaya is whip smart. The Minotaur/maze/Pac-Man connection is idiosyncratically brilliant. The poet, who did his PhD studies on James Joyce, sprinkles classical and literary allusions throughout his poems. It’s not, however, like reading the great TS Eliot, where a stack of reference books must be to hand.
Joyce gets a guernsey in one of the drollest poems, Cinematabolic, which is a riff on Finnegans Wake. Here are the opening lines: “Hiera that gufforging in the popcorn bushes? // Who gopher, wearing my super money under plans / on ’is nonce, mummering in backhards elvish, / slobbering on gin jeering cinememe eye crème?” There’s another nod at the start of the most beautiful poem in the collection, Credo, Decor, Coder, which is dedicated to the poet’s sisters: “… The salted ghost of Ian basks / by Buckleys Hole, daubing mozzie-coil ash / on canvas …”
Ian is Scottish artist Ian Fairweather, who lived for a time on Bribie Island, Queensland, which is where the poet grew up. The poem is about the poet and his siblings returning home to spread the ashes of their mother. “Woorim’s ghost crabs rallied early. / The most translucent one would be a priest, / clawing at the latest layer // of our loss.’’ And later: “… Well, we’re all elsewhere / now, Mum. Of course the tide rushed in / to delete the glyphs our heels were // grooving, even as the grey nurse hid / you in her ancient lidless eye, / the kind of eye that could hide urns.’’
The poet had a difficult childhood. His birth father, who is Indonesian, was absent. His Australian mother and Australian stepfather raised the children. This mixed upbringing becomes the serious ending of the hilarious poem Spork. As a proud owner of Splayds, I celebrate this tribute to unfashionable utilitarianism.
However there are no jokes in the poem Hard Water, about three brothers who are beaten by their father. “… Victor took the jug cord // to the boys for years”. Towards the end, the poet reveals that he, too, was beaten by his “… stepdad, who I call Dad”. Yet the poem ends with forgiveness. Tellingly, the collection is dedicated to “my fathers and my son”.
The poet and his wife, Emma, have experienced tragedies with her pregnancies and this is gently mentioned. Now, however, they are parents to Xavier, who has just turned two. I want to end with a heartfelt poem about him, sweetly titled The Keeper. The poet is deleting photos of his son from his smartphone, to free up space.
“Weighing up the keeper and the dud” he frets that “I may have culled the richest ones — / the shattered nights he xylophoned his food, // those weeded for the seedling of a frown, / the awkward angle for his triple chin. / The manic grin collapsing like a bridge. / The earliest bonfire of his outrage.” The poet realises he cannot keep all of this on his phone, or in his head, so he decides to “set them here instead”. His son will come to cherish that.