Watson, Wattison, Maling, Mead publish new poetry collections

The lay of the land is a recurring motif among a bunch of poets with varying styles.

Detail from the cover of Caitlin Maling’s Conversations I've Never Had.

Samuel Wagan Watson’s Love Poems and Death Threats (UQP, 120pp, $24.95) contains some of the most interesting, provocative and engaging prose around. He’s made the prose poem his own. While some conclude with his trademark haiku-as-signature, some of the more remarkable don’t, such as What is Wrong With This Picture?, after Charles Blackman. While occasionally veering too close to journalism (Cyclone City) or song lyric (Unforgiven), most of them consistently mobilise the heartfelt, the political and the jaunt in a distinct mix, and provide a poetic report on the 11 years since his previous collection, Smoke Encrypted Whispers.

Watson’s page is typographically dynamic, employing capitals, spacing, ellipses and italics to attractive effect. He has travelled a lot since his last book, and his poet-on-a-funded-jaunt poems at their best are uneasy, funny and complex. It’s not all vodka, monuments and evading publishers, however.

Proving the ongoing resonance of Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country, Watson links Mackellar’s nod to Australia’s terror to the terra of earth: the implication being that those who brought — and exploited — the concept of terra nullius also brought a homonymic terrorisation to the land. Watson’s use of repetition aligns this poem more closely with spoken word or hip-hop than the object descriptions or narrative conventions of the prose poem. He reads colonial Australia back at itself while implicating his poems in a lyrical demonstration of unique sensibility.

Sensibility and deftness are not enough, however: at times Watson manages to seem both original and predictable: a problem with rhythms (“throw salt’’), and titles that are too summary: Terror, Throw Salt, Scratched. Yet when the poem is good enough, as in the renovation of Murder of Crows, a late standout, the bracketing of the title with the conclusion works as a formal device.

Watson is known for his titles since cheap white goods at the dreamtime sale, and such titles do have more impact when unexpected. There are some great ones here: from the bombastic Apocalyptic quatrains: The Australian Wheat Board/Iraq Bribery Scandal to Boomerangs in a thunderstorm,Poetry on a green bridge and Napalm Kerouac and the maddening night. As the matches on the book’s cover indicate, burning and ghosts are predominant themes, and there’s a cumulative power in the repetition. In Let’s Talk, for example, which addresses reconciliation directly: ‘‘The blackness is not of our skin, brother, but the charcoal of fires where our dreams are created’’.

Meredith Wattison’s unassuming (in style and presentation) fifth book, terra bravura (Puncher and Wattman, 141pp, $25), is written in a mode that allows for ambition and capaciousness. Though many of the poems have been previously published individually, shorn of their titles they can be read as a long sequence. At times Wattison’s poems are like notes from memory or observation, linking her with contemporaries Laurie Duggan and John Anderson. Swans are a recurring feature, and an early appearance is startling, and captivating: ‘‘A black swan / followed me here,/ stars sobbing from its beak’’ (I am descended).

A later line appears as a perverse motto: ‘‘I understand sacrosanct, / septicaemia / and the careering written word’’ (The cool dark bank). Another indication of her poetics is after William Carlos Williams’ ‘‘The Red Wheelbarrow”. Wattison’s version is not minimal; it is 36 lines long (the original is eight), and mentions the wheelbarrow three times. It reverses the colour scheme, using blue, yellow and white instead of red and white; alludes (to Williams: ‘‘she reflects / white chickens’’, but also, hilariously, to the novelist that rhymes, that is, Dickens); quotes (‘‘so much depends / upon’’); dramatises (‘‘We have had a tropical downpour’’); personalises; feminises; and parodies Williams’s poem. All with the lightest touch.

Yet terra bravura is not all delightful literary play. Many of the poems reflect on Jewish European history, and on colony. One poem begins with a substantial quote on terra nullius from Jennifer Rutherford, before narrating an encounter with an abject and marvellous ‘‘striped, strange dog’’ that ‘‘shakes out brown pollen … it was the colour of the soil / its tail was edible, its skin made waistcoats // it was as loathed as a two-legged dingo, / the infinite, expelling ocean’’ (It slowly slunk towards me, weaving low, originally published as Australia).

Poems swerve into historical anecdote, and elsewhere Martha’s children wore the colours has a parenthetical remark about an engraver, butterfly collector and apparent ancestor, John Thomas Wattison; it also features a comic routine between mother and son. He is earnest, quotes European film-makers, argues about censorship, says “ ‘There is no bread. (i.e. There is no God.)’/ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘there’s bread behind you. / The rye you like.’ ’’ Striking lines abound such as ‘‘the stalking red fox in the loungeroom’’ from The geese on our dinner plates.

Despite practising a narrative confessional mode, Caitlin Maling’s Conversations I’ve Never Had (Fremantle Press, 88pp, $24.99), demarcates her poems (explicitly in The break) from what we might call high confessionalism by putting madness at a distance. Rather than infusing her poems with what madness can give, madness is relegated to being a subject: and, paradoxically, contained by the metaphor of ‘‘fire’’. The narrator uses a firebreak metaphor to claim sane space, and this attention to land — and, even more so, water — is typical of Maling’s book. One of several poems set in the US, North of the river, has a troubled ‘‘you’’ inform the narrator that they’re electricity, not flame. Some poems, such as this one and Town (‘‘I don’t know how to name / all the things I’m missing’’) give us just a bit too much: Maling could at times leave something in the tank.

But then she can pull out a surprise like Tacit Knowledge, which ends: ‘‘why can’t someone tell me if deer are crepuscular?’’ A number of poems refer to West Australian fishing life, and a young woman’s perspective on this is refreshing; Maling has a clean prose style that recalls early Robert Adamson and Gig Ryan. Everyone’s adolescence is unique, but tellings aren’t necessarily. Maling’s combination of hardness and emotion, experience and naivety, is productive and appealing. Yet lines such as ‘‘I miss nothing more than the simple honesty of the ocean, / the openness of the sea’’, from Things I missed about Cervantes while in Cambridge, read like a perverse dumbing down.

Maling is good on contemporary family relations, the complexes of need and resentment: ‘‘the unsaid flaring over coffee’’ (Back in Perth), but Medea to Jason is a regrettable “I”-as-one- note. The following poem, For My Lady M, is much more interesting, combining memory, study and a speculative alternative biography of Lady Macbeth.

A high point is the more abstract Homesick Song, a short poem or sonnet towards the end of the book where sea words, hyphens and affects are layered to musical effect: ‘‘I miss you sea-shallow with blue-sky flotilla /of surf-spray above the armada of adolescents / at the pilon dive-bombing the sea-bottom / below the tea-rooms all sea-shell ear-rim mauve’’. How I Spent My Eighteenth Year is also great and should perhaps have been placed earlier. Maling leaves the best poem, Directions, until last: this could have been a defining poem for the book.

Rachel Mead’s The Sixth Creek (Picaro Press, 70pp, $15) starts uncomfortably, its first poems not really telling us who she is or what the book is — apart from an apparent interest in the earth and the body, it’s not quite distinctive, not quite cliched. It would have been a different book had it opened with with Hope is a Perennial, which, despite its title, is a great activist lyric.

Distinction enters with the seventh poem, The Borderlands, with its awareness of scale and space, its dog-sheep interaction (though both may have strayed from Barbara Baynton’s Scrammy ‘and). Unlike Baynton’s story, there is no human drama or old-man mediation between the ungendered narrating ‘‘we’’ and the animals; the poem’s ultimate shift, to what ‘‘we’’ are afraid of, is unnecessary and unconvincing, however.

The ending problem recurs in Horsnell Gully with its privileged I/eye probing the bush after a storm: ‘‘These lessons lie open / to all eyes, this world / asking to be tasted with more / than human tongues’’. Perhaps it is, but the poem affirms ‘‘the human tongues’’. Mead (her very name an alcoholic time-shifter in Power Cut) is adventurous in moving between eras, as befits a concern with the colonial, yet the pastiche of Marble Hill I offers little besides contrast and sentiment; Marble Hill III demonstrates the ambition of the sequence: but we don’t want a pay-off, we want good poems all the way. III would have more suggestive power alone.

While not a thrilling poem exactly, The Dam is thrilling in its possibilities as it breaks down the urban/country division, as well as that between species. As pertinent as some of her (too many) epigraphs are, Mead’s catalogue of animal poems falls short: the strained allusion to Homer (The Bull Ant); the cliche of origami in describing a bird; and the closing diction of ‘‘allegro easing to adagio’’ (Wedge-tailed Eagle). All of which goes to say that these are unsettled poems, not quite sure how (post)colonial they are. In adding to the thousands of Australian animal poems we want something new (such as ‘‘until the beak deals death iceberg hard’’ from Tawny Frogmouth). There is humour here: in Housework (‘‘fold the plates away’’), and in Tried to Save the World but She Ran Me Down, where the title is enacted literally: ‘‘the last great wilderness … a tyre print down my back’’.

Michael Farrell is a poet and critic.