Review of Painting Red Orchids

I came across Eileen Chong via Jon Shaw, a participant in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, when I was putting together a roundup on books featuring diversity. Eileen has published three volumes of poetry: Burning Rice, Peony and Paining Red Orchids. The latter two contain poems about plants, and as I’m interested in botanical writing, my interest was piqued.

A while later, I asked Eileen if she’d be interested in writing a guest post for a focus on Australian women writers of ethnic heritage, and to my delight she agreed. She wrote about how, although English was the language of commerce, education and law in Singapore, where she lived for twenty years before moving to Australia, her qualifications and education in English were not recognised here because

This was a frustrating set of circumstances but, happily, it led her to poetry.

Painting Red Orchids has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and when you read it, you can see why. The first poem, the titular ‘Painting Red Orchids’, dips back and forth between animal, plant and human, reminding us of their interconnectedness and how this manifests as art: ‘My wife has made/this paper with mulberry from our gardens. I lift/my brush, pull back my sleeve and saturate the hairs.’ These hairs come from animals – weasel, wolf, mink and leopard – showing us how art binds us to the natural world. Yet art not only needs the labour of growing mulberries, it also needs emotion. This, too, is bound up with environment. The artist’s inkstone ‘was my father’s: slate/quarried from the lake where my great-grandfather/drowned himself one spring night’. The loss of breath returns, though, in the final stanza, to suggest renewal:

One stroke, one breath: leaves give way to blossom.

More water – rain and cloud above the trees.

Cochineal paste, jade seal – red orchid bloom on white.

It’s a beautifully crafted poem, carrying on conversations within itself.

Other poems about plants follow, slow, quiet and complex pieces. In ‘Fern’ each frond is ‘a sister/to another, so many fingers and hands/learning to flourish on the underside/of things’, a suggestion not only of how the plant grows in the understory, but also how it steadily, unshowily, grows, ‘unafraid/of the dark, pushing through stem, bark/growing vein by stubborn vein through morning dew and winter rain’.

‘Orchidaceae: Vanda ‘Miss Joaquin’ is named for Ashkhen Hovakimian, who bred the hybrid orchid, now Singapore’s national flower. The flower’s back is ‘turned to front, violet frills — blooms/like bruises along a curving spine’, a mingling of human and plant that reappears in ‘her petal skin calling to attention/the minute hairs on my thighs’, and which aptly mirrors the fact that the woman is now the plant, as it was named after her. However, as the spelling wasn’t accurate, ‘The heart of the flower/is the misnamed woman’ who is now ‘forced to live on always’.

Not all the poems in Painting Red Orchids are about plants. Many of them circle around the domestic: the friends, lovers, music and food, all contained within houses, or gardens, as Leike is in ‘Elegy’. A cat that was once ‘sinuous, pliant, a wound/spring’, he is no longer ‘among the violets or seeking shade/in the agapanthus, but buried. Dirt/covering honey, amber eyes now glassed’. The line breaks emphasise energy —wound, with its double meaning of tightness and loss — and bluntness — the finality of soil, which covers the loveliness of honey. The poem shunts back and forth between beauty, comfort and loss, summarising life in a way.

In ‘Revisit’ the narrator visits her grandmother who ‘forgets that she has made the tea./She boils water again, and forgets the leaves./Yet my grandmother has not forgotten me’. The rhyme in the poem – tea, leaves, me – mirrors the repetitiveness of trying to remember, and forgetting, and remembering again.

What I love about these poems is their simplicity. They’re so pared back that they are like plinths, holding up their images. Each of her books, too, are beautiful, and I like taking them out, looking at them and reading them. You can check them out at Pitt Street Poetry or on Eileen’s website.

This is my fifth review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Fishing in the Devonian

O’er November we leapt, and I didn’t get any blog posts down as I was madly tying things up before going travelling for a month for conferences, a writers festival & research. And now that I’m back I find that Christmas is less than a fortnight away and I have some nine reviews to write to meet the challenge I set myself for the Australian Women Writers Challenge. So, as usual, yours truly is hitting the panic button which will lead to an outpouring of creativity & thence a collapse in front of the Christmas tree, where the dog will find me and lick my face.

The festival was Quantum Words, a science writing festival organised by Jane McCredie, who also edited this year’s Best Australian Science Writing 2016 (a jolly good Christmas present for anyone still scratching their heads). I was on a panel titled How Science Made Me a Better Writer alongside poet Carol Jenkins and playwright James Saunders, chaired by the lovely novelist & journalist Ashley Hay. I spoke about the ecobiography I’m writing and how Georgiana Molloy was probably not only Western Australia’s first female scientist, but also its first female science writer. And I described how science makes me a better writer because it gives me fresh ideas and encourages precision and collaboration.

James described the TV programme he’s making about scientists and consciousness, which was fascinating (keep an eye out for it!) and Carol read out some of her poems. When I heard the latter, my toes began to tingle. Writing poems about science, she said, is way more interesting than writing about one’s cat or one’s ex. I agreed, and after the session I bought her second book of poems, Xn, and when I got home I ordered the first, Fishing in the Devonian.

The Devonian is a period of 60 million years, beginning at the end of the Silurian period some 400 million years ago. It’s named after Devon, in England, where the rocks from this period were first studied. It was an exciting period: plants began to stretch across land and grow into forests, evolving leaves and roots; the first seed-bearing plants appeared; the fins of the ancestors of tetrapods (four-legged creatures) evolved into legs and they began to walk on land; the oceans were increasingly populated with primitive sharks and placoderms (fish with armoured plates and pelvic fins, which gave rise to the limbs of the tetrapods) dominated watery environments. Fish in general became very diverse and the era was dubbed the ‘Age of Fish’.

Aptly, then, the first poem in the book is the titular ‘Fishing in the Devonian’ and aptly, Carol writes, ‘There is a lot/to think about in fishing in the Devonian’, including the contemplation of these life forms. You can sit in your boat and watch Tiktaalik rosae tempted by ‘the attractive ooze of mudflats/with morsels of scorpions and millipedes … trying its best to get out’ like its fellow fish, which ‘throng/up and over the shore on their lobed fins’. But, she humorously adds, be careful of the boat you use, for ‘spongey Devonian wood’ doesn’t have much by the way of ‘secondary thickening/through a stout source of carbon’ – the trees haven’t yet evolved to be strong enough!

It’s a charming poem to open with, and the poems that follow are similarly captivating. ‘A Life in Fridges’ describes fifteen fridges, capturing the arc of the narrator’s life from childhood to adulthood. As a child, she spent some time ‘opening the door to feel the engagement/and disengagement of the catch./ The term shut the door comes into/common parlance’. What child hasn’t been day absorbed in a fridge seal like this, especially on a summer’s day when the gust of cool air from the interior is so much more satisfying that a fan stirring hot air, and your mother tells you to stop wasting electricity? When she leaves home ‘someone’s old beer fridge/is dragged dripping, like adulthood/into the kitchen of McEvoy Ave’. This fridge is old and animated, it ‘coughs mechanically, a late/night shudder, as if dreaming it forgot how/to breathe and then the motor kicks back in/and gets on with it’. Then there is a baby and ‘the magnets come/the first twenty six/are the bloody alphabet which I pick up/about a thousand times a week’ and, finally, the markers of comfortable middle-age: ‘three kinds of yoghurt, five chutneys,/six varieties of soft cheese, a Tardis trail through dark matter,/time and meals’. It’s a clever way of telling a life; taking a quotidian object we never think about and investing it with personality, memory and attachment. The ending is so superb, and characteristically funny, that it’s worth quoting in full:

            Outside is a public demonstration of family life;

of the inside, I say to visitors, don’t open that fridge,

it’s like my unconscious, there are good things in there

and some things you will not want to know.

To illustrate this, and that the term vegetable crisper

is an oxymoron, I gently lever up a liquid zucchini,

fizzing slightly yellow, photograph it and post this on the door. (51)

 So yes, not all the poems are about science. Many are about childhood and growing up, sex, romance and women, one whom ‘throws herself/ – perfect body, less one breast – /off the cliff onto the rocks’ (How Much, p. 40) – and all of them, whether muted or bold – carry sensory detail that pulls the reader into another moment, then releases them.

I found only one poem to be clunky – ‘Kulin Seasons’ – a braiding of descriptions of the seasons described by the Kulin people and a series of events throughout the year advertising sales in stores. While some of the descriptions are delicate and gorgeous – witness ‘In kangaroo-apple season/you can watch small bats/harvesting insects from twilight’ – the author’s intent was too obvious, and it unsettled me.

And my favourite? Too hard to pick, but I loved these few lines from ‘Disorders of Belief’: ‘She wanted to believe in bone, muscle, blood,/skin and pheromones but ran into the anaesthetic/of romance, the predisposition to delusional/sexually receptive states’ (11), for what is romance but the swish of chemicals? And what are clouds, but symbols of inexpressibility, viz.:

I am photographing clouds, they are so hard

to talk to, carrying in an elegiac mass all the words

I didn’t say that were perfect for when we weren’t

lying together on a paisley cotton quilt, that

your great aunt, who bred silkworms, didn’t make. (‘Fifteen Tangents, p. 69).

Are clouds all that isn’t there? At any rate they are good metaphors for poems – we study their shapes and try to decode their meaning.

All this year I’ve been buying poetry books to compel myself to start writing poetry again, but I’ve been so busy & tired that I haven’t had time to do anything except get to the end of my nonfiction book, Hearing Maud. However, 2017 awaits, and Carol is such a marvelous writer that she has persuaded me, when gaps of time open, to plug them with poetry.

This is my second review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

London and I

I will never love London – the city’s streets harbour too much of my unhappiness for that - but recently we have been jostling into a ... slightly less aggressive relationship. I blame Tim Burton and the way his cobbles glistened in Sweeney Todd with the London damp and how, on an evening a few weeks ago, the fog rolled along the streets, reminding me of lamp posts and frock coats. I marvelled that our dingy East End suburb, which is Victorian if you approach it from one end, but perfectly depressing if you come through the council flats at the opposite end, could be so evocative.

This sentience has been augmented by a book of poetry I found on the shelves at the library – Sean Borodale’s Notes for an Atlas, an account of his walks through London. I am very particular about my poetry - well, I am about most things – and this work passes the bar. It’s a very visual piece of work (unsurprisingly, as Borodale is also an artist), grounded by wonderful detail and an interesting technique, whereby the writer puts his reader into his shoes, yet he rarely relies upon the sometimes clunking ‘you.’ For example:

‘Pass black railings and flowers
of iron set within the railings at intervals. See a
bed in a basement room. Read GIVE WAY. A
man with a snooker cue under his right arm,
walking, looks into a bag he carries and there is
a sparkle once. Pass men kissing in a room.
Over the window of the room in blue letters
read TAVERNA. Hear, “God some of the
blokes can’t hold the beer ... and language I
can’t understand.” Car. Hear the steps of a
woman. Crying horn of a siren. And hear, “I’ve
never seen you smile so much.”
(Isinglass, 2003, p. 126)

What delighted me most about the work was these snippets of overheard conversation. I once read in an autobiography of a deaf man that what he missed most was not being able to hear, but not being able to overhear. I would agree with this only up to a point – if I could hear the madwoman I work with wittering on all day (to herself, if not to some poor bastard unlucky to be caught in conversation with her), I’d be dragged down into her depths of derangement. However, it is true that there’s something almost exotic about banalities when you can’t hear them.

The poet relies heavily upon the upon the senses of sound and sight, and the effect of this is a certain detachment. The flaneur isn’t overcome or invaded by smells, and he certainly doesn’t touch anything – his body is sealed off and impregnable. This seems to be characteristic of Londoners in general – they huddle not only against the cold but against possible eye contact and – God forbid it – a friendly smile.

The work isn’t difficult to read, but it’s dense, so I only dip into it now and then. There isn’t a driving narrative, only my interest in where he walks and whether his language will change according to the socioeconomics of the areas he’s in. So far I haven’t read enough to tell.

I’ve also been reading Nabakov’s short stories, which make my own efforts at short story writing seem paltry. However some of the endings are far too enigmatic, and though I have guilty of doing this myself, I think it’s lazy on the part of the writer to let the reader try and make meaning of some abrupt, surrealist series of events. This might appeal to some, but I don’t like being left completely mystified.

Nabakov also uses second person sometimes. This style can be quite didactic, but when he uses it as a love letter, as in ‘Sounds’, it becomes touchingly intimate. I’m tempted to go back to Lolita, but I find it a disturbing work, not least because it’s so beautifully crafted that the subject matter is rendered less insidious than it seems, but I’ll leave all this for another day.

Our Houses are Full of Smoke

This is the title of a book of poems by Deb Westbury, who taught me in my first year of writing at the University of Wollongong. It sprang to mind when, having taken the lid off the rice cooker prior to serving dinner, and having sat down to consume said dinner, I smelled burning. I dashed back into the kitchen and found the room hazy with smoke, while a small fire was in progress upon the cooker lid. I grabbed a teatowel and whacked it out, whereupon I discovered that I’d left the element on and the entire plastic handle had melted into black liquid. The tiny screws that had once held it to the steel lid had been released, tittering into the sink.

Who was the idiot who ever invented electric hobs? Why did our landlord not install a gas oven? For one can see gas burning, thereby avoiding the melting of implements. And when mummy said, ‘A bad worker always blames his tools,’ she was of course completely wrong.

I opened all the windows and went back to my dinner, thinking of a poem with the line ‘Midnight is the smell of burning.’ From memory it’s about a woman whose husband has left her, and who constantly leaves the elements on and wakes up to burning in the middle of the night. It is a beautiful metaphor for a woman made vacant through loss.

Deb’s only son was killed by a train, and whenever I think of her I wonder how she is. I also recall the poem she wrote for Scarp, the Creative Writing department’s literary magazine, after the accident. In the last few lines she wrote of the cry of a crow, and it seemed to hold all of her sadness.

The theme of smoke and disorientated women has drifted into my own life, this being my first afternoon off in nearly a month, aside from the election weekend, when I was too sick to enjoy myself anyway. I’ve worked nonstop on my thesis and on my research project for a Queensland academic, as well as the usual work at the library. I’m counting the days until Christmas, when H and I go to stay with our friends in the country and I shall be without work, phone or internet (God help me, how shall I live?) for three days. Then there will be a few more days of furious writing, until we fly into the blinding sunlight of Thailand.

I Remain

I am officially gardened-, stately-mansioned- and leafy-greened-out. Yes, the Whites have returned from their Garden Tour of England. We managed not to kill one another, though things at times were somewhat fraught. An account of our rambles and attendant absurdities will follow, as soon as I see the parental unit off on the plane, catch up on my sleep and batter myself into a sturdier frame of mind, for coming back to London has seemed like returning to prison.

In the interim, those of you in the dark nebulae of cyberspace who are musically inclined might like to listen to my poem, I Remain, which was turned into a song by Sarah Chamberlain of the Guildhall School of Music, and performed at Wigmore Hall by Carleen Ebbs.

Since it's impossible for an author to be objective about their work, I don't know if it's any good, but I like it, so I'm not too fussed about its quality.