Reaching for the Beyond

In his incisive biography of C.S. Lewis (sometime Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge), A.N. Wilson approves of Lewis’s statement: “It is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.” This may encourage our own, direct reading of the poets and to begin more happily from our own starting points. I also include the aphorism of D.T. Suzuki that Alessio Zanelli uses to introduce his volume. Suzuki wrote, “Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself.” I read this as a question about the enterprise of poetry.

Oisín Breen is the most difficult or challenging of the eight poets in this review. He is an enfant terrible, as the notes on the back cover indicate. Part of his life is “rip-roaring” and another part is “lived in a one-donkey town”. One peer accords his work some of the intensity of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg. I revisited “Howl” to test this claim and, while intense, found Ginsberg more reader-friendly.

Breen tells us that his poems are intended for both reading and performance and are a selection from a larger corpus that spans three years. He tells us that the poems are “centred on the relationship between meaning and identity; pleasure and vice; and who really left the wine stains on the rug”. The inclusion of a CD of the poet reading his work indicates serious intent. I listened to it to grasp his declamatory style, lines delivered with energy and urgency in semi-incantatory manner. For full wizardry and the incantatory, one can listen to an old audio of W.B. Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, which modern technology makes available online.

The poet’s name has its own legacy in the Oisín of Irish legend. Yeats’s first collection (1889) was titled The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. Oisín Breen’s three very long poems that make up the book exhibit an existential flow and an intense and noisy inwardness mingled with contemporary Aesopian wisdom. The title of the first poem—“Isn’t the Act of Placing Flowers on a Tomb a Gesture Bringing a Little Life Back to the Dead?”—is not really asking a question but is an assertion of parabolic wisdom. I select one passage from the poems and leave it with the reader as a taste of the declamatory, the incantatory and the intense:

It was three-times it happened, and on the third day, I slew a cockerel just to smooth its dried ochre in a paste over my thought-slit eyes, to stem the euphoric auroral cleaving my perception of time, as I had a vision of the
potentate of the death of heat whose crystalline halitosis pushed a hot slag
through my star burst skull and left me reeling.

James McAuley’s famous Ern Malley sequence suggested itself at this point. Ginsberg’s “Howl” can also show how the poets’ skulls compare: “who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull”. Webster’s skull in Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality” may lurk. Perhaps as a non-Irish reader I am hindered when reading Breen by constantly referencing Heaney and Yeats, who are seated in the corner. 

Three Poets expresses the collective wisdom of three accomplished poets born in the 1940s and 1950s. The notes outline each author’s substantive publication record. The book evokes the sense of a community of poets who are friends. It expresses social capital; or as Putnam could have said: each poet is not bowling alone.

Andrew Hamilton SJ, consulting editor of the journal Eureka Street, wrote in the introduction: “the poet is like a religious believer, reaching always for the beyond, hoping to capture the ever elusive. Indeed, all serious poetry is religious poetry in the broadest sense.”

Robert Drummond begins with an overtly religious poem that contains hints of the great Sydney poet Kenneth Slessor. It recalls a retreat at Tarrawarra Abbey, with “five bells before daylight” and “freestyling back down into a luminous dream”. When raised from sleep, he had already climbed “out of fitful sleep … lazily as a fish ascending”.

“The Wind along the River” uses a long sequence of changing metaphors. The wind is variously likened to the blade of a helicopter, a grief-stricken mother, cut grass swirling inside a blender, the applause of leaves, and even a blow-drier. For its anamnestic force, I like his long poem of adolescent reminiscence, “The Boxing Tent at the Easter Fair”. A lad of fifteen accepts a dare to enter the boxing ring of a travelling troupe and shapes up against an older man from a tougher world. It ends with the inevitable thumping “in the foetal position, dry retching a toffee apple onto an anonymous shoe”.

“Postcards from Barwon Heads Estuary” is comprised of a dozen or so shorter poems taken as the equivalent of postcards, once commonplace in the pre-digital age. Edward Reilly cross-references to this poem from within one of his Garden poems. “Postcards” is deeply in touch with the human and natural elements of place.

Grant Fraser has been a member of the legal profession and some of his fine poems here are formally religious and some are formally comical. They are all precise.

The collection begins within a structure provided by an observation of nine paintings by Rembrandt. Art interpreting art-works here, though poems sometimes diminish rather than double in value when they are about other works of art.

“Ireland in My Distant Blood” runs through three pages and is masterly. It evokes Ireland across its centuries, through personal realities, and in its natural form. It begins with a paean to the Atlantic coast, where an “albatross rested on its yeasting wing, / Listing in its high accolades”. Part two of the poem moves into the dualities of holy and unholy places in which Ireland’s conflicted history rises with “the statute against Genuflections” and “the ghost of Oliver Cromwell”. This deeply engaging and educative poem ends with the momentous Dublin Easter of 1916. This is conveyed in the astute line: “counting out bullets like children’s sweets”. I prefer this line to Breen’s blunter description of Dublin as a city “built with your grandfather’s bullet wounds”.

Not wishing to be overwhelmed by the traumas of history, Fraser includes sixteen comic graces to say before different meals. One may well need to pray before eating spaghetti bolognese while wearing a freshly-laundered white shirt.

Edward Reilly completes Three Poets. He begins with four longer, long-lined poems about gardens. These are accessible, full of invitation; gardens where people have worked and harvested and cele­brated across generations and open to memory and friendship. “Savour. / Stars revolve around this Eden, this centre of the world.”

“Perfection” is a satirical poem about the foibles of human obsession with perfection. Even Ken and Barbie get together in this ménage of types, as does near-psychotic lawn envy over the nap of “water-hungry Kentucky Blue”. Reilly brings a strongly European sensibility to his poems and many are set in European places. This is not surprising given that a British and wider European overlay has shaped this continent. “Olive Trees, New Norcia” illustrates this. The history of that place in Western Australia is steeped in the cultured and musically talented Spanish missionary Rosendo Salvado, who was so liked by the citizens of the fledgling British colony that they offered him British citizenship. He accepted. In that colonial hinterland, he made his own new Norcia. This may echo the concluding line of his final poem, “Towards an Ars Poetica”; “the voice on the radio counselling / Make it new, make it new!” But even when under the olive trees at New Norcia, Reilly elides in an instant to that European world: “Would that I were there now …” when “Once, under some olives, I recalled the beaters causing such cascades.” 

Shane McCauley is a significant poet who has lived a long time in Western Australia. Sweeping Away the Mandala is his ninth book of poems. This substantial collection runs to two hundred pages arranged under six section headings. The book is worthy of a longer review. The title fascinates me because of its verbal or verb power. Does the book itself contribute to sweeping away the mandala? If so, there is a very definite philosophy of poetry expressed. There is weight in that participle.

An Australian reader might approach the contents page with a sense of recognition of local and distant places. The local includes “Pilbara Gorge”, “Guilderton Dawn”, “Rain at Cottesloe”, “Rottnest”, and “Perth” amongst others. Other poems are set in England and Italy and others move quite directly from China, Japan, Korea and India and enter the metaphysical realm of Buddhist insight and practice.

The opening poem of the section headed “A Thousand Views of the Ocean” is called “Sunya” (a Theravada Buddhist term we translate as “void”), and it contains a sense of blissful non-substance emptiness; a formless transcendence at the heart of reality. Some poems in this section are Haiku-like in their simplicity. Minimalism tends towards the void.

Because I once knew Cottesloe well, I began with his poem “Rain at Cottesloe”. It contains an outstanding image amongst its distinctive representation on the page as a poem expressed in two vertical columns. Words in each column speak across the gap, or vertically within each column. Tactile rain and sand create a “momentary braille” to “read the wind”. This works for me.

The title poem, “Sweeping Away the Mandala”, is central to McCauley’s themes. The mandala is a complex, highly-patterned work of art or design in coloured sands or other media. The reader can find definitions for esoteric terms like Kalchakra (wheel of time) and Vasudhara. The mandala expresses psychological and metaphysical images of reality and the mandala can evoke a more direct or immediate experience as, in the end, it dispenses with the sand pattern itself. It dispenses with images and disappears. It is swept away to indicate its status as artifice, and to sign transience in the face of sunya, the void.

The sand mandala can be likened to a poem. I think McCauley himself does this with the title of his book, by which he gives this specific function to his poems. The mandala and the poem are human artefacts and acts of poiesis by which something new is brought into being. The mandala and the poem may also be about something not able to be contained by the art.

The title poem has a Perth referent for me because I know that Buddhist monks once created the Yamantaka (destroyer of death) mandala in a West Australian gallery and afterwards dispersed this sand-mandala into the waters of the Swan River.

“Assisi” captures something of a Catholic spiritual experience:

I saw one once …
and it gave me a gift of wounds
and in my head was a great singing
as of infinite choruses of birds.

The five years between books gives substantial time to enjoy these poems of intellect, poetic discipline and deepening religious or spiritual insight. The book ends with a poem that probes nasty prizes on what I call the chocolate wheel of life (Kalchakra revisited?). “The God of Unlucky Days”—that oft-banished god who always returns, in years of drought, flood, fire and virus and who was also known by great Australian poets who have died young. There is a lot of pressure on the sand mandala to deliver. I commend this book.

The publisher’s card enclosed with Alessio Zanelli’s book tells me that the author was born in Cremona in 1963 and has “long adopted English as his creative language”. His poems are included “extensively in literary magazines from 13 countries”. The Secret of Archery is his fifth original collection and consists of fifty poems. I have noted his use of Suzuki’s paradoxical aphorism which seems to generate his title. Aiming at oneself may also be true of all teaching. In assessing one’s own student, does one self-assess as teacher?

The title poem explores the theme of personal freedom and suggests elements that may make it illusory.

Mistakenly,
Most have it
that they trace their course,
set their targets,
decide when and where
to aim the arrow.
A tiny few realize
that others string the bow,
then nock and draw it.

I read “In the Bathroom, Reading Auden” because I like much of Auden’s poetry and collect his books. Auden’s best poems are amongst the very best of the twentieth century. I found Zanelli’s poem difficult to follow, despite its attractive title. The poem’s first, long sentence contains seven commas, three semi-colons and two colons, which asks too much of the reader. It was clear that the Auden poem being read was “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. He describes Auden’s attitude to Yeats in that poem as “affectionate”. I read that poem with a vocabulary more in the zone of edginess, grief, bitter sadness and admiration.

Zanelli’s “Mare Nostrum” appealed to me. It engages a place across the passage of time so that the poem opens out and takes the reader into depths evoked by the structure of five five-line verses. Rhymes and half-rhymes intra-connect and give the poem a musicality. Thus: “Dardanelles, Hercules, shoals, world, Byzantium, erections, sitters, shingles, inlets, Taranto, elephants, millennia.” The poem gathers personages (Odoacer, Zeno, Germanic tourists, Hannibal), and places (Africa, French Riviera, Capri, Gulf of Taranto). The poem holds together this diversity of time, place and people as did the Mediterranean—“our sea”.

Recently, I read the papers of Frank Coaldrake, an Anglican missionary priest in Japan in the years immediately after the Second World War. Coaldrake, a pacifist, was the first Australian civilian to live in Japan in those post-war years. This increased my interest in Frank Lees and his RAAF posting with 77 Squadron to Japan, Bofu and Iwakuni in 1946-47. It clearly shaped the rest of the then young man’s life.

There is a dramatic contrast between the title of Lees’s book Dragonfly: Haiku and Harmony and the circumstances of the war and immediate post-war Japan. Fragility and beauty sit uncomfortably against those extremities.

The book is a recollection of a distant past. The ten pages of haiku give form to a sense of fleetingness, beauty and longing. As the preface says, “The haiku is a perfect way of capturing a moment of experience.” This very small book does not seem to be commercially published.

Flowers, All Sorts in Blossom, Figs, Berries and Fruits Forgotten
by Oisín Breen
Poems Oisin Breen, 2020, 95 pages 

Three Poets
by Robert Drummond, Grant Fraser, Edward Reilly
Geelong Writers Inc., 2019, 111 pages 

Sweeping Away the Mandala
by Shane McCauley
Sunline Press, 2019, 200 pages 

The Secrets of Archery
by Alessio Zanelli
Greenwich Exchange, 2019, 66 pages 

Dragonfly Haiku and Harmony
by Frank A. Lees
Privately published, 12 pages

Dr Ivan Head was warden of two Anglican university colleges for twenty-seven years. He holds degrees from the University of Western Australia, the Melbourne College of Divinity and Glasgow University. His previous omnibus poetry review in Quadrant appeared in the September 2019 issue.