This week’s
“Something Old” is written by a guest reviewer, the distinguished
Australian-resident poet Jennifer Compton, whose work has been reviewed
previously on this blog [look up “Jennifer Compton” on the index at right].
When I asked Jennifer to write a “Something Old” for me, she responded by
forwarding this review of the work of Australian poet Ian McBryde. The review
is notable for the judicious way the reviewer balances what is admirable and
what is worth criticising in McBryde’s work. This review originally appeared in
Quadrant, under the heading “No
Cheating Now”. Due acknowledgement is made to Quadrant.
I was eager
to read Ian McBryde's newest book, The Adoption Order, because I liked
his previous book, Slivers (Flat Chat Press 2005), so very much. Slivers
is one of the few books that I re-read to check if the magic is still
potent. And so far, so good. The heroic voice of the poet leads me through a
Bladerunner landscape, smokey visions of epic sorrows and ironies.
''I was able to save
everyone except you. And me.”
Slivers fires
up my synapses in the same way an elegantly wrought cryptic crossword does.
And it
interests me that in his previous book Domain (Five Islands Press 2004),
there is a visual poem called Cryptic Crossword, which sets out on the page
searing twentieth century words such as BABI-YAR, BIALYSTOK, CONCCAMP.
But I
cannot take to Domain. I quarrel with it.
Did Lida Barova really press her
forehead to the steamy glass in the train, remembering the noisy champagne
promises? And at the Wannsee Conference was the laughter of chauffeurs, as they
threw snowballs, audible to the black uniforms clustered inside? Surely you can
only know these things if you were there.
This captious, scrupulous stance of
mine leaves very little room for the work of poetry, and its right to imagine
anything and go anywhere. Perhaps I should simply blame the poet. The poet
failed to convince. I intuited that he trusted the powerful words -
Kristallnacht, ZyklonB – that he scattered in our faces would do their work
while he drew his skirts aside.
But still there are lines that
resonate and evident skill. Ian McBryde is always a poet. I wouldn't quarrel
with his work so much, or like it so much, if he wasn't, pre-eminently, a fine
poet. He is not clumsy, and rarely strikes a bum note. But I do accuse him of
with-holding.
I venture to think that because he
has a charismatic stage presence and a compelling voice, he can put a poem
across to an audience, but that the poem sometimes lies on the page, without
benefit of his artistry, lacking a little ...
something. What he can deliver within his performance, he sometimes
with-holds from the poem.
I ended my quarrel with Domain
as I read it on a crowded bus, and a German teacher, reading over my shoulder,
told me - “That German is wrong. It is not Guten Nacht. It is Gute Nacht.”
There
is something subtly askew with the book, and there is an end to it.
I turned to the new book, The
Adoption Order, with high hopes. I was at the launch at Collected Works
bookshop here in Melbourne, and Ian read several poems with conviction and a
high sense of drama, and I understood the book to have a strong narrative
thread. The imagining of a mother and father who could never be identified or
known. The title lead me down that path, and the appealing photo of a little
boy on the end page, staring into an empty fireplace, did not persuade me I was
on the wrong path. The last verse of Motherlode, the last poem on the
book, fell, like a stone into a deep well, into my mind.
“Language vanishes, the days
have changed shape. I will die
with your name in my mouth.”
I remember those lines, and the way
Ian said them. They have the trick of poetry, the insinuating way of being
memorable.
And then I came to read the book as
a piece, as a whole. I sat to it, looking for story. The unfolding of a
journey, and some of the stations along the way.
The epigraph, courtesy of Lola
Montez, - “Courage. And shuffle the cards.”
- set the book in motion. And what a wonderful opening salvo of a poem. I quote
in full.
“Genealogy
Mother an empty tenement.
Father the sound makes
on metal roofs.
Sister a splintered boat
washed onto rocks.
Brother dust in cathedrals.
Wife the light
glancing off ice fields.
My children these still
and silent rooms
I wake to.”
But then I found myself not being
able to find the nub of the thing. Characters were being introduced who were
not delineated for me, the reader. Meryl Leppard, Sarah Gray, Marion McBryde,
Peter McBryde, Sheila McBryde, and others. Their names appeared as dedications
at the tops of poems. Who are they? Are they, perhaps, an empty tenement, a
splintered boat, the light glancing off icefields?
The cast in this book is too large
for me to get a grip on it. And the persona of the book has two mothers and two
fathers which compounds my difficulty. I suspect the unknown biological father
is the one who, in Outage, reaches for the child with dead hands, bony
claws. And the unknown biological mother is the woman in Love Song Played
Backwards who is walking away through a field of wheat, which is –
“ ... silent and motionless
and blank as Saskatchewan.”
But I suppose an adopted child
creates many many ideas of the original parents. There is a confusion, a
tangle.
I
resorted to google to find out what the Wilson Code was. It was too important a
pointer to the long poem – The Wilson Code – which starts out in 1772 -
“We burst furiously out of a history of
fists” - and ends in Melbourne in 2009, to let pass in ignorance.
“Can't sleep. What to do when the pills and
the whiskey
and the smoke are no longer enough. Close
your eyes
in a warm place. Know all the Irish rivers
are born
from tears.”
The poem ends by going finally to
sleep, dreaming of Armagh.
And of course, google helped me out.
The Wilson Code (or the Jim Wilson Code) is American Airlines code for the
shipment of coffins and cadavers. The ancestors are being delivered to me.
I know this review is not being very
generous to one of our most interesting poets, so, at this late stage, I will
hastily say that The Adoption Order came very close to being the book
Ian McBryde set out to write. And within it are stand alone poems that create
their own world and breathe their own air. For instance, Songs for Paul, where
the poet imagines how and why he was conceived, within which he summons up the
father.
“Late May.
Guess she's had the kid by now.
Little bastard.”
This poem gives me all the stepping
stones I need. It is powerful, and wistful, and bravura, and it turns back in
on itself and completes the circle.
“No cheating now. Spell rescue. Don't look.
Spell ruin. Spell empty well. Spell memory.”