Invasions of Insight

In reading and reviewing these four books, I reverted to some technical advice on a distinction between blank verse, free verse, and verse where rhyme, half-rhyme and vocal musicality predominate. These four books are generally free verse and invite an apt response from the reader that is open to the distinctive power of this direct poetic voice and what sustains it and can make it brilliant. Some express a more direct inwardness somewhat detached from the perceived world of place, time, event and sensory richness in as much as the focus is on the inward state of the poet’s mind, or on the inferred state of another person’s mind. Other poems are richly located in outer time and place, and in perception: where the specifics of colloquial accuracy and aptness launch the reader into spaces where new thoughts flourish. Powerful and evocative descriptions can yet be catalysts for an intense inwardness.

This balance of perception and inwardness applies particularly to Barry Hill’s Cold Mountain and the Sea. It conveys a profound sense of outer and inner worlds where the poet sustains the point of balance and intersection between them—in the work itself, and even with a sense that it is some virtus of the poet that enables this. Hill’s work had the added diachronicity of ready reference to a philosopher-mendicant of older Chinese tradition, and this story running in the background was a constant referent and help in the present. Han Shan could even be described as a swimming companion. Cold Mountain and the Sea also provoked explorations via net search into new areas of inquiry.

Richard Allen’s work has the same sense of balance between inner and outer realms, between “you” and “I” where these can be approached as purity of inner self behind all outward masks, events and phenomena.

Both poets evoked a sense of inwardness and, whether intentional or not, invited a phenomenological analysis of “What is going on in the poet’s mind?” I anchor this in a remark by the painter Jeffrey Smart: “Suddenly I will see something that seizes me … a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows. And I send up a prayer because I know I have seen a picture.”

The poetic moment lies in parallel to this painterly comment. Hill and Allen, particularly, gave me a sense of the poet as invaded by moments of rich insight that simply approach the poet in some direct way (in the mind or via the senses) for which the poem is the given and crafted matrix of endurance and communication. It is there too in Kerwin and Pearson, but differently.

Louise Kerwin’s Whispers of My Heart is self-published. To self-publish is to take a risk, but the opportunities for commercial and professional publication of poetry volumes are as scanty as men of religion on the outer Barcoo. The self-publishing poet might find that it was better to print fewer volumes at higher price than to have boxes of books at a lesser print price stored in the spare room. I don’t know how many books are in Kerwin’s print run.

The only thing beyond self-publication is self-review. The poet seizes the day and extols quod scripsi. Walt Whitman did this in 1855 with Leaves of Grass and, without his considered narcissism, he might have died in the void of obscurity, still waiting for his brilliance to be discovered. Books themselves are an increasingly curious commodity in Australia, with main-street stores struggling against those online. Thus, self-publication gains ground.

The poems in this book extol free verse and are about love and deep inner feeling and strive to be directly personal and self-revelatory. As the back cover puts it, Kerwin “expresses her insight into the romance of the heart, what it means to be in love with oneself first to be able to share that love with another”. Or: “A love so great there are no words / But the feelings you can feel” (page 14). One can find love poetry difficult. Even the biblical images of the Song of Songs can wither away and lose traction. Likening one’s lover’s hair to a flock of goats upon the slopes of Mt Gilead no longer cuts it. Robert Burns’s “A Red Red Rose” can seem hackneyed until well sung or well read. But it thrives after more than two centuries.

Kerwin’s free verse tends towards prose rather than poetry and has an air of enlightened self-help about it. It has a directness that some will seek. It has a dimension of the therapeutic about it and that may arise from other areas of the poet’s professional life. One can net-search “Louise Kerwin Rockhampton Queensland” to go straight to the source. 

Cold Mountain and the Sea by Barry Hill is deeply-considered poetry by a master of his craft. It is a book to which I shall return. If by “whisky” one meant that golden liquor that was the reward of successful labour, to be enjoyed across an evening, then this is a double shot to be micro-sipped in considered appreciation, lest something be missed. The volume is attuned to an Eastern tradition of contemplative yet pragmatic insight in the life work of Han Shan. Or, as his page of aphorism has it, Lao Tzu says: “The Tao drifts / it can go left or right”. The advance information tells us that the contents of the book “arise from two summers of swimming with the Zen Master Han Shan”. In this world, the poet is literally swimming with friends around Queenscliff near Port Phillip Heads. Han Shan is the intellectual and metaphysical guide from an older Chinese tradition of philosophy and meditative insight and is well worth a net search. Hill swims with Han Shan in his mind and body. Not only is Han Shan a repository and point of reference but the sensory detail of ocean and beach and fellow-swimmers are the outer referents to inner states of mind or spirit. Here they become deeply observant and tactile and have an incarnate quality. The poems synthesise these dimensions and enable a kind of floating or transition between worlds and domains.

The book as artifact is lovely. The image for the cover is beautiful: a large, blue-toned ocean wave about to overreach and cascade. It exhales foam and spray. It is thinkable that the picture was also chosen to resonate with the wood-block print by Hokusai Under the Wave off Kanagawa, or The Great Wave (c. 1830). “Pictures of the floating world” translates the Japanese term for that style of painting. Apt for this book.

“The Wave” is a long, multi-sectioned poem. In places, a large stingray is mentioned as a fellow occupant of the sea. “The Wave” is prefaced with the ironic Han Shan: “I am the Wave Official of the Eastern Sea”. Hill is then back in his studio where, via photograph, “I own the wave” since “A photograph of it hangs on the wall”. It “abuts an image of shifting sands— / a dot painting by a black woman far inland. I won’t promise she’s from Utopia but she probably is.” In some brief notes that follow the poems (and which Hill constrains by saying “you don’t need to know any of this”) he introduces a further layer of meaning that comes from another painting: “In [Gary] Shead’s The Wave, the figure akin to D.H. Lawrence is in disarray and adrift in the ‘gaping womb of the sea’, along with his naked wife, Frieda.”

Sand and the wave both shift to formlessness and the not-self view of self, the non-substantial self that is constructed in the micro-flow of time. A number of Australian poets have drawn from the Buddhistic sense of both the transitoriness of life or existence and the core sense that the reality of self is more an activity of construction from particulates than of an enduring soul or spiritual entity. This has led to a flowering of poems in which intense observation of the contents of nano units of time is captured and expressed as the quiet speech of the world, or under and throughout the world

“The Wave” expresses that transitoriness. The wave appears as a massive something: “Its body wide, like a whale / it slides into the bay”. It breaks into constituents of foam and droplets and energy—as may the human person. It reads, in part:

From the top I kick-started
and nose
dived into the sky
water whiteness … a shoal of foam
behind me.

… huge silent swell
where waves gathered themselves
listing ultramarine
in green-blue cradling toughs—

Such happy indigo buoyancy
I could not hear a thing until
I looked down a face
up came the alpine roar
there was nothing to it
but the avalanche of self

and a roaring
when there is no self
as it falls
into forms
undoing themselves.

The detail draws the reader into a personal meta­physic. The sea, for all its tension between form, energy and formlessness, is both brilliantly coloured, brilliantly noticed and perceived and is even an incarnadine indicator of human richness. The poems, while tending towards emptiness (sunya as a Theraveda term for the void or emptiness might be useful) also exhibit a fullness of being in intensely perceptual riffs.

The craft of the book is then doubly compounded by the selection of apophthegmatic material as preface to it. Here we can loop back from “The Wave” to the preface of Cold Mountain and the Sea to find an early explorer’s note and yet still be on the same page. Thus, “It is very probable that at a good distance from the Shore there exists a Channel of deeper Water round the edge of this Sand Bank and this point shall not be left undetermined” (John Murray, log of the Lady Nelson, March 4, 1802, approaching the sandy cliffs at the heads of Port Phillip Bay).

On the paintings that Hill mentions. I had a moment of serendipity when looking at works by the indigenous artists Michael Eather and Lin Onus, on display at the Ngununggula Gallery in Retford Park, Bowral. They developed a use of stylised totem animals (stingray and dingo) in their paintings. One work, whimsically titled Michael and I are Just Slipping Down to the Pub for a Minute, directly references the Hokusai wood block Great Wave, adapting it via a whimsical image of the dingo surfing on the stingray on the crest of the great wave. “The Wave” concludes with the ray:

I was a wave passing
over it
then the barb of its tail was visible: and to it I was a wave shadow …

The great ray just signalled
the weight of things
in a time of plague.

It is hard to add to the accolades already given this book. This book contains a lot of fireworks, rockets smaller and greater that ignite and rise into the night. The notes on pages 102 and 103 are very helpful and, at many points in the poems themselves, one wants to take time out and go with a trajectory into a deeper realm, and to enter more fully into what the poems offer. I wish the book every success.

Richard Allen’s The Short Story of You and I presents poetry of intense inwardness and can be taken both as poems of a holistic intersubjectivity between flesh and blood individuals and as an abstracted reflection on the mysteries of separate subjectivities: the I as the subject in self-reflection, and “the other I” that is someone else, the second person singular that “you” are. In this, the discipline of phenomenological self-exploration can come alive, and this is part of the success and strength of these deeply considered poems. The volume begins with that sense of the fragmented self, ironically self-deprecating, where the waking poet is likened to an ancient shipwreck being raised carefully from the seabed: “keep an eye on me, / all my separate pieces / yearn to fold back into the sea”.

The back cover tells us that Allen “has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date”. The inside cover indicates that Hale & Iremonger published his first volume, The Way Out At Last, in 1981. A steady stream has followed. Hill and Allen bring decades of poetic craft and personal insight to their poems.

Allen, like Hill, has a referent point in a metaphysic. The second comment on the back cover says that his subject “is Being itself”. One wants to stay more accessible than high German metaphysics and the poetry remains the thing that does this. The third comment notes the philosophical and the meta-poetic but balances this with “the hyper-focused”. The fourth comment praises the everyday, where “the mess of the quotidian uncovers epiphanies”.

The book’s title may embrace two specific people. The poem “The Wedding Dress” has a specificity about it. He prefaces his poems by saying: “My poems are sleeping in these pages, waiting for you to rouse them.” His preface also raises the topic of reader-response and its role in completing the poem. How you read the poem matters, but you have to start from where you are. But this may be little more than to say that any reader cannot but bring their experiences to the reading of the poems, and that some poems will trigger responses that may not have been in the formal scope of any poetic intent.

The first poem, “Delicate Awakening”, locates the poet awakening from sleep. The final poem, “Code Calls for Angels”, is equally simple and limpid. It is essentially four sentences that contain and condense reflection on time and happiness and the question of whether anything can be said to be meant to be or foreordained. Allen tells the reader that “This was a day / that was planned.” That simple statement is supplanted by a complex successor: “This was a day that existed in the future long before it existed in the / present. In fact the day had been pre-lived a thousand times.” The fourth apophthegm identifies that day as the day “you called off the search to be happy”.

The poet might be addressing himself or the reader or another off-stage individual known within his own biography. It is Zen-like. Perhaps calling off the search to be happy is what brings final happiness. To undercut and invert the quest in some way as in a Zen of sport where, curiously, one can aim at winning by not aiming at winning. The goal is different and winning, or happiness, is an adjunct achieved by the more oblique or tangential aim. It cannot be grasped at.

Take the short poem “Centrifugal”, where he asserts polar opposites. Desire is considered as that which holds his particles together and is yet simultaneously that which pulls them apart. This might refence an underlying Buddhistic theory that can be explored and pushed harder, but this short “wisdom poem” is sufficient in itself to provoke the reader to think about self-identity and interrelationship. Interrelationship gets a physical gig in the powerfully named poem “The Braille of Sex”.

Allen’s longer poem, “The Captain of the Men of Death”, extends from pages 95 to 110 and contains far more than a single wisdom-saying. He prefaces the poem with an etymology tracking John Bunyan’s 1680 description of consumption (tuberculosis) as “the captain of all these men of death” and then gives some modern usages. The poem is a long, mostly free-verse reflection on death and on death as approaching during an illness. It ends with the lines, “Not today will I die / Anyone else’s idea of a good death. Today I slay the beast.” Putting death to death is an interesting twist with a long pedigree in religion and philosophy.

Along the way in “The Captain of the Men of Death”, there are references to other wayfarers, and broad and deep allusions to the topic. It includes his most lyrical rhapsody in these lines:

Do not squander the exquisite rapture,

At best it won’t be long—just

The tremble of an instant—before time

Floods back in, smoothing over these glimpses

At the quivering fissure in the space-time continuum,

Like water from a dam unleashed into the valley

Of an abandoned town,

Leaving no trace above the waves

To remind us of the abandoned lives that once lived beneath it,

Except for the reach of the slender arm of a lone church steeple

Yearning towards the sky.

There is an (unintended?) touch of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius in this, an inferential sense of a moment the soul departs the body, and the limits of human experience and language are pressed in an attempt to describe this. But perhaps that is my rousing what is sleeping in these pages. Allen’s work invites diligent re-reading and lengthy reflection.

In The Complete Apparition, K.F. Pearson has provided the largest book for this omnibus review. The public transport bus on which we travel is an abridgment of the Latin omnibus from omnis meaning “all”, and reaches us via nineteenth-century French when a large horse-drawn coach carried “all”. There will be something “for all” in 280 pages of poetry, perhaps even in the poem “Evacuation Bus”.

The book is published by Black Pepper in North Fitzroy, a company which Pearson co-founded in 1995 with Gail Hannah. Pearson’s publication record precedes the founding of Black Pepper and it does not indicate that he has published a book since 2006. This may give a further sense to “Complete”. The book is excellently produced, with a cover reproduction of a Fred Williams etching from 1955.

The first poem, “Parting Gifts”, is a short verse of thirteen lines and is in list form. The list assigns geometric shapes to aspects of a journey: a circle for his return, a square for his stool, a triangle for balance. It ends with a pentagon for peace. The last poem in the book is “The Yarra Bank Address” and I read it as a reflection on an open-air poetry reading. The first eight lines are in quotation marks and seem to outline what a poet has read aloud. The eight lines liken human performance to that of the insects. This scene is interrupted or end-framed by a female parachutist who “touches earth so lightly” before being greeted.

I think it is Pearson’s direct voice that has the last line in the book: “Apparition pray for us”. I suppose that is postmodern rhetoric, gesturing back to a time when a literal heavenly figure, a goddess or even a Mother of God “Sopra Minerva” would be asked literally and sincerely to pray for us. Perhaps it is now a gesture at the vacuity of the times and the death of the gods or indeed of the God. The apparition of the title occurs not only here but in the prefatory poem “Apparition”, the Cat. It also occurs in the poem “OED Follies” in the lines: “There isn’t his word ‘apparitional’. It has no official place / … and its noun’s object does not exist!” There is a clever reference to Robert Frost in “The Tram not Taken”. Perhaps the strength of this lengthy volume lies in the sense that it invites reflection on the sense of apparition, of insubstantiality in contemporary life.

The Short Story of You and I
by Richard James Allen
UWA Publishing, 2019, 112 pages, $22.99

Cold Mountain and the Sea
by Barry Hill
Arcadia, 2021, 106 pages, $24.95

Whispers of My Heart
by Louise Kerwin
Louise Kerwin, 2021, 65 pages, $32.99

The Complete Apparition
by K.F. Pearson
Black Pepper, 2021, 283 pages, $27

Ivan Head’s most recent omnibus poetry review appeared in the January-February issue