Unfiltered Lives

Arcadia has two fine poets in this review, and they know each other’s work. Tom Petsinis has the following comment on the back cover of Maria Foroudi’s book Tears in My Bread: “The reader is taken on a journey through family life, the body, illness, migration to Australia and visits to Greece.” He says that the poems have an elegiac tone and affirm “poetry’s transformative power”.

I enjoyed Maria Foroudi’s poems because they achieve a luminous simplicity that is the result both of the experiences considered and of a mastery of language that trims excess and hyperbole. The poems reach an affective zone, a depth of reflection and recollected emotion (anamnesis) that draws the reader into these core human experiences. The simplicity is embedded in the vocabulary, which often settles on words like tears, bread, womb, knife, needle, bird, blood, house, garden, priest, fruit, skin, nipples, bees, lemons. Such seemingly simple words are loaded with a wealth of experiences, both within the poet and within the reader, and thus depth and variety are not far away. The poems open up possibilities rather than close them down. They do not direct the reader but invite. The note on the author mentions prizes in the Greek Australian Cultural League’s Literary Competition in 2005, 2006, 2015 and 2017. I am not surprised.

In Greek tradition there is a link between hyperbole and other terms coming from the verb we translate as throw, or in the noun form, ball. Thus we can have the symbolic or the diabolic—things placed together or alongside each other, or things thrown apart. It is even found in the Greek of the Fourth Gospel where simple terms have taken on weight and depth and become signs or perhaps participatory symbols. Thus wine, vine, bread, light, way, door, sheep or lamb and shepherd. Seemingly simple words can arrive heavily laden.

Consider the adjacent poems “Trees” and “Father’s Home”, where the background is simultaneously dark and light and a blend of joy and sorrow. They should be read together. Indeed the whole book has a connectivity running through it. “Trees” begins with a note on a lemon tree that will not grow, stubborn in its inertia in clay-hard soil. But it does not need a trip to the garden centre or hardware store to buy the apt fertiliser. The poet simply notes that it lacks the fertiliser of braying donkeys. It seems the absent donkeys announce village life elsewhere in distant decades, as do the sensuous “florets of the pomegranate” which are “redolent of sun and sleep in my mother’s village”. Delight and beauty increase with thyme and “kissed bees flitting in and out / Of golden dots like devoted lovers”. The poet then imagines herself as carrying some of this pollen as if to pollinate a garden as a giant bee. The poem concludes with the note that her “pockets fill with lemons from a tree / As tall as an Ottoman mansion”. I shall return to the use of Ottoman.

In “Father’s Home”, fruitfulness is carried over in the lines:

It carries my father’s boyish laugh

And my mother’s blush

Their love song ringing through fruited groves.

We know that this orchard is elsewhere. It is in the past in another place. The poem began, “I search for my father’s home / But my hands and mind cannot follow lines on maps”.

Notes on the author tell us that Maria Papageorgiou Foroudi was born in Melbourne in 1979 to immigrant parents. The poems in part find and distil the essence of intergenerational experience that had to be acquired, learned, inferred, or made one’s own in ways that differ because of the parental or grandparental relocations. Is there always a dislocation in relocation? Some Australians as they age may be missing nineteenth-century England, or even wish they could turn up in Somerset and find true home. The generations seem to condense and even shrink in some ways, but time contains something like longing and a sense of loss.

While reading Foroudi’s poems I was also reading Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece. The modern reader can begin to understand the break-up of the Ottoman empire and the forced relocations of 1923 and the emigration following the Second World War. The personal themes in her poems invite a parallel examination of some of these forces that shaped our world. Dislocation and emigration are powerful themes.

My note on these themes springs from her single, considered description of a lemon tree “as tall as an Ottoman mansion”. In the day, Ottoman was a term that arched across multiple ethnicities or what would become nations within which one would expect to find a dominant religion or language or other identity markers. There were both Greek and Turkish Ottomans, amongst many others. Theories of national identity (see Elie Kedourie) can be left for another exploration. Foroudi’s poetry has its own brilliance and integrity. I note this passage from “Bread”:

My grandmother lies trapped under

The glass of the picture frame

Wearing a kerchief tightly around her head

Turkish style.

Her poetry has eidetic force. The reader can feel and sense what she has recovered and expresses, and it is of great value. She has turned back and not turned to salt, but there are tears in her bread. 

Isolation by Tom Petsinis is identified as a COVID-19 collection. I recently reviewed another poet’s work on the same theme. One may get sick of Covid, but not these poems. The cover title expresses the theme by drawing attention to the ego or self by using a lower case i to begin Isolation and by replacing the o with a circular image of the virus. Back cover notes refer to “the feeling of estrangement” felt by men and women who have been in Covid lockdown—becoming strangers to their own lives. The poems are said to address and alleviate this new state in which many have found themselves—or lost themselves. I offer some notes on one poem that comes in three parts, “My Father’s X-Rays”, and a single poem called “Three Clouds”.

Once more, a poet is writing about the discovery or encounter with a parent—in this case, the father. Parents and children are symbiotic, and parent-child can be a dual term for a single ellipse with two foci. The poet finds his father’s x-rays in a large yellow envelope in a damaged filing cabinet that serves as archive. Father is now deceased. The cabinet had itself been forced or jemmied open twenty years earlier by a hopeful thief. Now death as that other thief in the night had also come unexpectedly. X-rays remain. There is more than one “empty look”.

The Covid theme is evoked in the second part of the poem where the x-rays are examined en plein air where there is “A white mask left breathless on bitumen”. In this brighter light, more can be seen on the image—and yet it is a case of more is less. The more he sees, the more he knows that his father really is not there; right down to the point on the image where he sees and does not see “The nothing from which I was conceived”.

It seems that seeing images of the material or organic body is at best a partial glimpse and more a reminder of what is now not see-able. As James McAuley said in his famous poem “Because”, “The living cannot call the dead collect”. For the time being they really have vanished. They are incommunicado and x-rays as ghostly reminders have a hint and also a torment about them. The third section of the poem continues that exploration of absence as the speaker traces the vertical path taken by the x-ray machine as it traverses down the body. The more detail, the more the absence. It is a precise and powerful poem.

“Three Clouds” begins Petsinis’s substantial collection. It is marked by vivid imagination. It begins in the precise and measured tones of DIY hardware, a project marked by Covid lockdown since immediately we are “Almost at the travel zone’s limit” on the trip to get the right masonry bit. It seems that the traffic lights turn red against him to permit “three white clouds passing by”. The first is a surgical face mask, the second a toilet roll, and the third is more highbrow: Mozart’s wig nodding to his Requiem. This whimsy is clever and amusing. It celebrates a human spirit irrepressible in the midst of constraint. In some ways these poems also express an emigration of the self, a journey to a newly imagined land in the face of crisis. The poems outweigh any culture of Covid exhaustion that one may feel. 

Way Stations is a very powerful, fifty-four-page collection in which each poem has been not only carefully written but also carefully considered for inclusion. We are reading Stephen Gilfedder’s best of the best and I am sure that some left-outs were also worthy. Gilfedder states that “These poems were written over a period of more than forty years” and he tells the reader that “the poems aim to portray the lives of individuals at moments in time, unfiltered, in their inherited and created environment and the circumstances that confront them”.

The statement chosen to head the collection and given a page to itself is Lucian Freud’s: “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.” This is well placed. The poems are in one sense vivid as a painting, as intensely hyper-real as a Freud painting, and they do capture moments that are intrinsic to a character, be that the poet or the character as subject matter within the poem.

The poetry is strikingly vivid. Take this line from “After Parthenius” in which the Olympic swimmer Boy Charlton is mentioned, though the poet is also the swimmer in this instance. “I swim the septic green of the rough sea pool”—writing which is about as impasto as one wants to get. Clock time for the swimmer is measured by “fob-sourced truth”, a phrase that itself draws the watch from the trainer’s pocket. The poem concludes with the poet “diving into the image of myself”.

Gilfedder was born in 1948, a year of partition and the movements of people. In his own childhood, he is surrounded by people from “elsewhere”, a theme deeply explored in the poem “My Fatherland”. Mrs Zimmerman the teacher was “just a refo” and children in the class are variously in Fairisle, lederhosen, or dirndl skirts. The poem explores German language and literature. One character, Brigitta, is destined to marry the colourfully identified man from Tom’s Trash Packs. Such are autobiographical facts from a vanished moment.

One revisited moment lies in an autobiographical reference to a forebear, James Joseph Gilfedder “killed in action May 31, 1916”, which introduces the poem “The Munitions Divers”. The images in sequence form an almost filmic record of time, then and now, from the Battle of Jutland to the present day when unexploded munitions are found and detonated, where memorial wreaths are still laid or placed overboard, where museums contain a sense of the past and the “rows of regulation graves, German and British lying together”. Adjacent

Along the cliff top

the Scandinavian nudists stand

in Walkman and sunglasses

watching the arrival of the dive launch …

All week the dull tremor

of detonations out to sea …

The poem enables the reader to see or imagine this in a sustained visual sequence.

“Backgrounder on the Grand Champignon, Australian Mushroom Show” is darkly funny. An invented or a real award, it is either a champion or a champignon. Further background is given in descriptions of untimely deaths or accidents around the mushroom shed—“Warren walked into the open septic”, “Cec bailed himself slipping off the combine”.

Perhaps the final Lucian Freud note belongs to the hyper-real poem “Veneration”, in which life’s accidents combine the fact of St Francis Xavier’s venerated arm in a reliquary in Rome, with a hand severed in a country accident in rural Victoria:

Wrapped in The Advocate the severed arm

Lay in Mrs Houlahan’s Coolgardie safe

For days in the outhouse above

A rammed earth floor as if waiting

For a Papal bull or miracle from Lourdes.

Some of these poems are as straight-to-camera grim as those of Philip Hodgins and they are as good, and that means very good indeed. Some just make me grin.

The poems in all three books covered in this review are highly accessible and enjoyable and well worth reading in the long Australian summer.

Tears in My Bread
by Maria Papageorgiou Foroudi
Arcadia, 2020, 83 pages, $22.95

Isolation
by Tom Petsinis
Arcadia, 2021, 115 pages, $22

Way Stations
by Stephen Gilfedder
Recent Work Press, 2021, 54 pages, $19.95

Ivan Head was Warden of Christ College in the University of Tasmania, and Warden of St Paul’s College in the University of Sydney. This is the latest of several omnibus poetry reviews he has written for Quadrant in recent years