Poetry reviews: O’Reilly, Kaur, Falzon, Kershaw

When we read “brown saliva over his wife’s flowers”, we wonder what might be next.

Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey shows the potential for fragmented narrative to be testimony.

Nathanael O’Reilly’s Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 100pp, $22.99) begins with pages of praise by critics, a gesture we are more familiar with in American books (O’Reilly lives in the US). It’s a reviewer’s job to resist such praise. One enthusiast talks of the “telling detail”, and when the first poem, Border Crossings, is a six-page catalogue of elegant, if not exactly precise, details (of things seen inside — and out the window of — a train traversing central Europe), I wonder what I’m being told.

I prefer the more perfunctory Lusitanian with its blunt ending regarding a woman who would “anglicise her name / abandon her former identity”. But Border Crossings takes on new meaning once we have read Today’s News from the Gulf, a poem of similar length, but concerning more violent actions (as sensationalised by different media). This poem, unlike Border Crossings, is a collage from media sources; at times it suggests likely enough scenes but ends on a note of absurdity, with riot police ­attacking celebrities.

Both poems, then, are about the writer’s ­control of the world: in the latter case as a ­consumer of media. O’Reilly’s particular ­problem seems to be that of style: how to sound convincing or worthwhile when he writes so finely? Even his cutups are elegant. A poem such as Bath Scenes (the town, not the tub) is able to fruitfully ironise the style, as it begins with a comic swoop like an ad, but then when we read “brown saliva over his wife’s flowers” we wonder what might be next (ladies’ laughed up guts, a vampire mask and Tom Jones, if that’s not a spoiler).

As the book’s title indicates, these are poems of travel, the poems’ narrator always going, or leaving, somewhere. It can be a bit glossy, with description standing in for photographs, and a bit mundane. When the narrator is hanging out with mafia in the Ukraine it becomes more compelling as narrative but not as poetry. Too many of the details (“We washed down fajitas with margaritas”, from Newlywed) are not ­telling at all. Not everything exists to be a poem. And, despite the filmic quality, there is too little that suggests there is more than one way of looking at and speaking about these things: such as the way women’s clothes fit their bodies.

A cliche is like a cemetery: it’s so filled with dead voices there’s no room for a live one (and the dead are ghosts not bones). Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (Andrews McMeel, 208pp, $24.95) is ostensibly lyrical in a very basic sense, in that it is about feelings, but there is little ­purchase made by the voice in the poems.

The Indian-Canadian poet is perhaps aware of this as they are supplemented by drawings of generally naff metaphors (for example, rose with thorns; coffee). The light bulb drawing is charming, in resembling sheep testicles. The coffee drawing accompanies the lines: “the next time you / have your coffee black / you’ll taste the bitter / state he left you in / it will make you weep / but you’ll never stop drinking / you’d rather have the / darkest parts of him / than have nothing”.

The line about weeping is redundant, ­suggesting there are levels of cliche. The lack of titles means readers can just enter the immediate speaking of the texts but also suggests a lack of consideration. There are better lines than the ones I’ve quoted — and worse.

Milk and Honey is not without interest, however. The first section, the hurting, deals with sexual abuse by a father. Here, deadness of voice and melodrama are, in a sense, apt. How can the abused say what they feel? What is ­interesting is the potential for fragmented ­narrative, which poetry allows, to be a form of testimony. The story is told without directly confronting the abuse, which is what, presumably, courtroom testimony requires.

Arguably, what follows diminishes any power of the first section. By the time we have gone past the loving section into the breaking, which both tell of adult relationships, to read: “i am a museum full of art / but you had your eyes shut”, you may be ready to laugh again. Perhaps you also may feel tricked into caring. The best way to read this book may be as an assemblage of lyric fragments, with relative appeal. At 200 pages it takes stamina. But if you like advice, you may find something relatively fresh among the suggestions in the closing section, Healing.

An image is something that activates our senses. Reading the initial pages of John ­Falzon’s Communists Like Us (UWAP, 100pp, $22.99), it seems to be without images — and more like Kaur’s book than you may expect, ­despite such a title, and a preface proclaiming “The revolution is alive”.

On page 25 we read: “Leila you will find me close to home at Pancake Rock”. The specific place doesn’t evoke something concrete, but suddenly I am alert to the possibility of something real. But the next line is “You are brave my Leila like poetry”. I go back to the prose preface, expecting contrast, to find “comrades filled with hope who are hopelessly in love”.

What can be done with this theme or ­perspective? This is the story of Amilcar and Leila, politicised lovers, in 100 poems, titled by number. It is mostly told in first person, with ­occasional poems in third. Sometimes the lines are awkwardly too short: “With nothing but the old fashioned / Kindliness / Of the / People”. The emphasis on “Kindliness” and “People” (practically subthemes) seems undermined by the emphasis on “Of the”.

Falzon is more comfortable with the long line, but when he wants to slow the words down and clarify the poem’s sentiment, he seems to be at a loss, formally. When not focused on generic love or beauty, however, Falzon does have a sense of sound: lines such as “Like a Maltese agitator” and “Kipping underneath the truck”, show that his poetry is, potentially, more than a desiccated love story.

As activists they are ­involved in world politics, though they seem to float through like ­bubbles. Or, as poem 76 suggests, figures in a painting by Chagall, “liquid humans”.

Poem 65 has the word happy three times in four lines, and happiness three times in five lines; “There’s nothing as revolutionary / As happiness” is the claim. The pick of these 100 poems for me is 82, a portrait of Amilcar’s father, where the irony is not so self-regarding: “He tried to read but lost his place and brought us jokes / By the scruff of their necks” and “We helped him into bed / And he gave me his hearing aids”.

Coming to Graham Kershaw’s Under­summer (Sunline Press, 96pp, $20) after the preceding, it seems a bit old-fashioned and nostalgic, especially in the earlier, more (b) romantic poems. A couple of later poems, addressed to a wife and daughter, are two of the weakest and verge on the banal. Kershaw is better at the human relational detail in dialogue with the rest of the world. His poetry resists the contemporary, where the term means kitsch. It is though, potentially, a poetry of broad appeal, for any audience willing to give it time, as any art ­requires. Frozen Ground ends: “to look coldly on this / with haunted eyes / and from an endless distance”. The word “haunted” may seem a bit melodramatic — they are looking at a cricket ground and some bush — though presumably Kershaw means it. But what struck me was the “and”, that a less sure poet would not have thought of including. Another way of distinguishing this poetry is that while it may trade occasionally in sentiment, it is not prettified, as in this from Great Stones:

Forty years have passed

since our grandad last dandled us

on his bony lap and laughed by the fire

drawing his fag with yellow fingertips …

Now I’m shaking over a pint alone

As the title suggests, one line of thought behind the poems is the exchange between summer and coldness, as represented by water for example. There is also the play between Europe and Australia (“This is Australia: / Play hard, or don’t play at all”, The Sapphire Coast). Some scenes are idiosyncratic, such as that of Harvest Skies, where the presence of wheat feels ­estranging when the poem features a Lady, a Lord and a ‘‘House Boy’’ called Brian. The Lord is, brilliantly, “smoking like a stricken frigate” and, in subtly sounding phrases, “Her Lady’s petty tyrannies will soon be / a memory as faint as the cries of owls at night / or the noontide taste of elderflower cordial / as obscure as the play of bats”.

The irony gets brutal in A Pleasure Dome in Derbyshire, where an election leaflet is “looking for wet stone / to slap its face against one more time”. Marking an anniversary produces one of the book’s best poems, A Priori, with the lines: “In streetside gardens / grass as green as hosepipes sings, February’s lost sprinklers / drowned in flowering clover, juicy flutes of scaffolding”.

A need to make an apology has one persona detailing Stormwrack: “black haystacks in the surf, broken ramparts of weed”. The Meteora, (allusively or uncannily?) similar to Judith Wright’s Black Cockatoos, has these birds crying the world’s end “like drowning sopranos”. It’s a tough business, finding — un-hubristic — equivalence or resonance in the relations ­between world and earth; at the juncture of sea and land: which comparison better fits the human? Kershaw’s sympathy and figural ability seem, on the evidence of Undersummer, to be up to the challenge.