Engaging with Transience

Bluestone
by Eugene Alexander Donnini
Pentridge Voices, 2023, 52 pages, $20.00

A Ghost Gum Leans Over
by Myron Lysenko
Flying Islands, 2021, 105 pages, $10.00

Little River Road: Zip Poems
by Jeremy Lockhart Nelson
Amazon.com.au, 2023, 133 pages, $20.00

Under Firethorn
by Richard Stanton
Ginninderra Press, 2022, 107 pages, $25.00

Eugene Donnini, widely published and active in poetry as performed art, has given the reader a powerful and condensed experience of incarceration in Pentridge Prison. The poems are interleaved with stark black-and-white photographic images of close-fitting Pentridge bluestones. These images intensify the sense of confinement and lack of freedoms that might be found elsewhere, whether remembered as lost, or hoped for. A tough monk might contemplate these stones as revelatory cosmic patterns, but inmates are more likely broken on them.

The poems gravitate towards the inner form which is the soul of the incarcerated person, the eternal verities of the self alone with itself, and almost despite the outward brutality and meanness of place.

Whether imprisonment is deserved or not deserved is not an issue. The issue for the poet lies in the soul of the ones who live there, and of the prospect of rising to reflective self-awareness or of losing oneself entirely.

But under certain conditions, particularly institutionalised violence—as was the case in H Division—such a facade can become toxic by destroying the very soul of that person until the mask is the only reality.

For him, there was eventual release,
but not from that inner desecration
that blistered by degrees, till eventually
it consumed him.
Flourishing in that place
where his soul used to be.

The book is highly considered and deeply engaging—put together with the precision of bluestone.

Myron Lysenko’s A Ghost Gum Leans Over also discloses the soul, though not in the same way. Inwardness is the same theme throughout his minimalist forms of haiku and senryu that gesture at what is contained in each moment, to which attention is paid. The poems catch the moment of coalescence in which a sense of self is sustained. The reader can be arrested in the same moment, as the poet expresses it with a handful of syllables, such as:

nectarine blossoms—
the teenager diagnosed
with bone cancer.

It is possible to take another path at this point and explore Buddhist metaphysical descriptions of the self as a non-substantial construct or aggregate, partly of sensory experience in temporal sequence. It is sufficient to let the poetry do its work—which in this place is done by the image of “nectarine blossoms” counterbalancing the human plight, while themselves speaking impermanence. Flowers work as similar cantilevers in other places in the book:

secrets—
the magnolia buds
tightly closed

And

blooming wattle
we watch a kangaroo
fall on the freeway.

Lysenko is widely published and a promoter of haiku in Victoria. He has given readers a fine, pocket-sized book with a treasury of insight, at once tiny and expansive, and with a beautiful cover image from a painting by Lilly Chorni.

Jeremy Lockhart Nelson’s Little River Road: Zip Poems also engages with minimalist haiku, though the poems are not haiku as such. They strike me as a vertical stream of haikuistic terms that flow down each page as if small waterfalls in little creek beds. They display the same measure of step that the poet took between 2004 and 2005 when these poems were formed in the experiences generated “by early morning walks along this road from one mid-winter to the next”.

The feet of the poem are singular and syllabic as the poet steps out at a walking pace. A metrical analysis of the poems shows mostly in his use of the rare monometer and dimeter forms (readers may be more familiar with the five feet of the pentameter) expressing the slow, creative steps of the walker. The book moves at a leisurely, reflective pace.

Winter’s
lymph light
chills
my face.

I find the pattern entrancing, or mesmeric in some way, capturing the sense that the one walking is deep in thought, in a kind of free thought where the mind becomes a tabula rasa, a page in which poetry begins to appear.

I walk
a mottled
road that
custom’s

Tongue
calls
black and
see
beside
it

In
earth
winter’s
graveyard
autumn
leaves.

The whole book justifies the use of the vertical in place of the horizontal line. It puts a lot less on each page, but as someone has said, “less is more”.

It sustains a sense of inwardness in immediate response to the precise external setting, the perceived world of the walker. The metrical pattern also reconnects (unintentionally, no doubt) with the simple bi-polarity of the image in Stephen Spender’s great poem “Chalk Blue”; in the opening and closing momentum of the butterfly wing, upperside and underside variation of colour, the realm of the sky above, an underworld beneath. I offer one more example of the vertical line that takes the reader into a single moment as a question:

Pale
blue
flower
do you
close
your cup
to stave
off cold
or guard
your seed
from the
night’s
worm?

Nelson’s deep engagement with a world that is literally created and sacred is prefaced by the explicit declaration: “An offering to Christ, Our Lord, and the People of Braidwood”. I note that the magpie appears regularly along the Little River Road and is a totemic or sacred bird in some sense. A sacred magpie can sing “Kyrie eleison” and this winged creature recurs at least eight times across the book.

And
is
it
matins
from
the
black
boned
tree
that
early
magpies
sing?

Perhaps the publication of the poems some twenty years after their composition is due to the appearance of Amazon as a distinctive type of publisher. I am glad that the book is now out.

Richard Stanton has given us Under Firethorn, his third volume with Ginninderra Press. It is more traditional in form, made up of reflective and observational poems in blank verse. The book’s title refers to the firethorn, a flowering shrub and a relative of the better-known cotoneaster. It is both the seat of adolescent wilful use of an airgun and the means to introduce an intergenerational reflection on the personal impact of the First World War and the Gallipoli campaign. Trauma can play out intergenerationally and be part of a family’s long-cycle story, and long-cycle remembering. Two long poems, “Under Firethorn” and “Under Firethorn 2.0” pursue this theme. I was reminded of a scene in a Tim Winton biography where an adolescent ponders the misuse of a twenty-two rifle.

The book makes use of some delightful irony, such as the poem “Griffith”, where the café question,

What could you possibly do in Griffith
for three nights
replied the dopey old codger
at the next table
at the café
at Hunters Hill …

is answered silently by the poet who asks the same within himself, but with respect to Hunters Hill.

Phonemic puns occur in “Passing Water”, which, if by riverbank or bridge, need not be painful—unlike the urinary tract infection referred to euphemistically by the doctor. Other poems are about enduring traditions, like churchgoing, and about Christianity in its social forms, as they retreat like a tide going right out, and perhaps not returning. One reads of a family tradition attached to the colonial church in St John’s, Parramatta, or more tellingly, in “Conversion”, which begins with the question: “At what point does one cease to be Christian?’”

These are interesting and valuable poems to ponder in times when little country churches are put up for sale as bed-and-breakfast investments or to create a capital fund for bishops to do new things, while paying reparations for abusive clergy. Or perhaps it is the last of the nuns’ religious houses, since they are no more.

Stanton comments: “These poems are inspired by the landscape and imagination with frequent collisions between the two.” The collision ends in the final poem with its preference for cremation rather than burial so that mortal remains are not confined simply to one of the places on the globe where life has been lived. A portion of ashes will go as follows—

… scatter me
across the High Plain
when the wind gets up to forty knots …
the High Plain of Bogong
for me
ash in the wind
by the side of the road
with its yellow
above the snowline.

The Book of Common Prayer knew this long ago, as did the ancient author of the 103rd Psalm, where “the wind blows over [the flower of the field] and it is gone”. Permit the philosopher in me a final comment (perhaps applicable in some way to all four poets) derived from Eric Mascall’s Gifford Lectures (1971) in Edinburgh. In The Openness of Being he said something like, “One can perceive a thing and the ground of its being in a single co-intuitive act.” That could be a sub-distillation expressing something about the engagement with transience that is found in each of these four good poets.

Ivan Head lives in retirement near Bowral and contributes poetry and prose frequently to Quadrant. He was the head of university colleges in Tasmania and Sydney for twenty-seven years.