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This took place yesterday in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, as part of Adelaide Writer’s Week, with a spectacular line-up – Alison Flett, Nelson Hedditch, Rachael Mead, Rob Walker and Manal Younus.
Facilitated by Peter Goldsworthy, a stalwart of the South Australian poetry scene, each poet was introduced to share some of their work with a packed audience. Alison was up first.
I love Alison’s work, particularly her fox and vessel poems, of which, among others, she shared both. ‘Liminoid’ is from Semiosphere, Alison’s Little Windows chapbook, and describes an encounter with a fox where there was still all the noise going on around me but there was a pencil line of silence running between me and the fox.
Alison then shared the first part of the trilogy ‘Vessel’, which symbolises the stages of womanhood and opens with:
No one else has seen inside this child.
She is small. The sky does not yet come down
around her. It is still contained
in a blue strip at the top of the page.
Nelson was up next, a performance poet I wasn’t familiar with, who has a passion for rhythm and words, which punched through. With his collection Never Finish Anything, Nelson began with ‘End to the Means’, which, like any brilliant performance poet, he recited from memory. ‘Homeostasis’ slowed down the pace from a song, ending in the line when I was born, I looked into my dad’s eyes like I’d been here before. Nelson also shared a poem written by his grandmother, ‘Words are dry shells, which presented a series of evocative images. When not poeting, Nelson is a hip-hop artist by the name of Dialect, at which I’m sure he’s just as talented.
Third to read was Rachael, another of my favourite poets, sharing some of my favourites too, starting with ‘The wild grammar of leeches’ from her new collection The Flaw in the Pattern, UWA Publishing :
I shed my clothes like an awful first draft, splashing river
on my face and into places used to their own company…
I look down to find my body being edited, its pages
harshly corrected with black punctuation.
Rachael also read ‘Powerless’, an award-winning poem I’ve shared on here recently from the Grieve Anthology along with ‘The dog, the blackbird and the anxious mind’, which was published in Meanjin, where while walking the dog, he drags me like I’m emotional baggage he’s desperate to escape.
Rob took to the podium next, again whose work I admire. He opened with ‘An accident waiting to happen’ from his collection Tropeland, Five Islands Press, which relayed a series of bad things, including I am the scissors in the hand of the running child. Rob also read ‘A Clarity of Smog’, which won Friendly Street Poet’s Satura Prize in 2015 (the year one of my own was shortlisted), followed by ‘radiology’ from his chapbook Policies & Procedures, Garron Publishing, where:
holding our futures in nervous hands
we come with xrays – ikons
in large envelopes with corporate logos…
this arcane analysis
reading the stars within…
Manal finished the set, another unfamiliar poet to me, her poise and delivery impeccable. Manal began with ‘Girl’, in honour of International Women’s Day tomorrow, further emphasised by the readings being held where they were. A particularly poignant piece, it compared woman to tree where ‘flowers are bi-products’ culminating in the stunning lines:
The burden is not who you are
but who you are asked to be.
Manal then shared a poem she had performed earlier that day, ‘Colour me in’, at a high school, in which we’re asked to colour me kind, colour me strong and colour me conscience so I see things others do not.
The readings were followed by the essential book buying and signing, so once again, I’ve got me some reading to do!
Tuesday evening saw the launch at The Howling Owl of the second series of chapbooks from Little Windows Press; a small local publisher with ‘little books, big horizons’.
Launched by Jill Jones, an extremely talented and acclaimed poet herself, these chapbooks are exquisite – pieces of art in their own right – and in this limited-edition print run present work by Ali Cobby Eckermann, Kathryn Hummel, Jen Hadfield and Adam Aitken.
Ali read first from The Aura of Loss, a collection of poems exploring the stolen generation and its impact on those survivors who carry its grief. Ali is a Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet and author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight. Her poem ‘My mother’s love’ is a painful insight to maternal absence – ‘her touch is devoid and I am frantic’ – followed by a peeling of the self until ‘my fingers now bones dipped in blood I etch the lines of my first poem’, a haunting final image.
Kathryn’s diverse award-winning work spans poetry, non-fiction, fiction and photography, published and performed both here and overseas. Her last collection, The Bangalore Set, delves into her time in India. Among others, Kat shared ‘Wharf’ from her chapbook The Body that Holds, a poem about Port Adelaide where ‘time is a sinew to be thinned between thumb and forefinger’ and ‘rumination has its own magnifying silence.’ With nothing to do, two men wait while ‘between a jacket and its lining a flat light comes’.
Alison read poems from Jen’s chapbook Mortis and Tenon, a fellow Scottish poet whose own work is simply brilliant, while Jen lives in the Shetland Islands. As well as poet, Jen is a visual artist and bookmaker, winning the T.S. Eliot prize with her second collection Nigh-No-Place. Jen has language in landscape, beautifully evident in ‘Two Limpet Poems’ in which ‘above the rockpool everything is tilt or rough glazed in weed like afterbirth’ and where ‘This is no place to turn up without a shell / all that protects us from the press of heaven.’
Jill read some of Adam’s work in his absence who lives in Sydney and has had a number of poetry collections published, in addition to short fiction in journals and anthologies. Adam’s chapbook, Notes on the River, are just that; vivid snapshots that explore its nuances as in the title poem where ‘It is not a river but a question.’ A plethora of images flow thereafter, culminating in a favourite – ‘Eels find their way to flood. They dream of babies, stalk the shadows and lay each other down in them.’
With eye-catching covers and painstaking production, these chapbooks really are a gift, and in this series with the wonderful addition of pull out poems to keep handy when you need a little bliss.
Last night I went to the launch of Little Windows at Booknook & Bean, an exciting new line of chapbooks from poets Jill Jones and Alison Flett. Published in a series of four, poets Andy Jackson and John Glenday helped Jill and Alison fulfill the first quota.
These limited edition handmade chapbooks are exquisite, developed to get South Australian poets on the map and this they will do. Alison introduced the series, thanking all those involved in its production, before handing over to Jennifer Liston to MC the event, with each poet sharing three poems from their chapbooks.
John was first up, joining the event via Skype from Scotland, and began with ‘the apple ghost’, a haunting poem of loss in which an old woman has kept the last apples her husband picked before he died. There are ‘shelf over shelf of apples, weightless with decay’ prompting the dead husband to roam the home at night and attempt to try ‘to hang the fruit back on the tree.’ The ‘undark’ followed, the first poem in the chapbook, continuing the delicate theme of death where ‘those girls’ have ‘come back’, ‘their footprints gleam in the past like alien snow’ and the light they once had has ‘burned through the cotton of their lives’. John’s final poem I didn’t quite catch (too busy manoeuvring a crate to sit down!) but I’m glad to have discovered his work.
Alison read next, sharing three poems from her fox series, which I adore, beginning with ‘fox 1: umvelt’ where he moves ‘in silence through the city’, ‘the pavements are thick with his thick foxy scent’ and after he’s gone, leaves ‘his shadow smoking and stamping in the air.’ In ‘fox 2: corporeal’ aspects of the fox are presented; ‘his eyes are amber planets’, his tail with its ‘bristling quivering tips’, his ‘feet listening to the nothing’, his heart ‘a dark livid thing.’ The human connection is explored in ‘fox 3: liminoid’ when Alison encounters one crossing the road ahead as she walks with her friends from a nightclub, feeling ‘a pencil line of silence’ running between them as they regard one another in the din, and how this ‘gift from the fox’ returns ‘when theres noise all around’, ‘its taut string singing the silence’.
Andy followed with ‘blue mountains line’, a poignant journey in a train carriage ‘the colour of tendon and bone’, where ‘outside, the mist has lifted and left behind the shudder and billow of mountains’ and ‘that knocking is only an empty wheelchair, wobbling with the motion of the train.’ Andy then read ‘breathing’ posing the question ‘How do I carry this air?’, the scene a cremation described as ‘Theatre in reverse, decomposing you into these vague and pressing sensations in my head and chest’, leaving us with the simple line ‘Breathe out, breathe in -.’ Andy finished with a wonderful poem I’ve heard him read before, ‘what I have under my shirt’, offerings to explain the impact of Marfan Syndrome; ‘a speed hump (your eyes must slow down approaching)’, ‘the shape of my father’, ‘infinite shirts’.
Jill completed the readings beginning with ‘the wall, the door, the rain’, a thought-provoking poem where ‘there’s nothing I can claim of this world someone keeps giving away’ being ‘white with entitlements and modern footwear while blasphemy accumulates in my dreams’. Next came ‘big apples leaf summer’ rich with childhood and ‘the kindness of leaves’, as Jill contemplates ‘I am to be diamonds, pick me-ups, queer riddles you do not know’, crossing the playground her ‘confusion was greater than the hills’. Jill left us with ‘mighty tree’, the final poem in her chapbook, each line a stand-alone statement knitting beautiful images, where at the end she pleads ‘Oh mighty tree fall on me. Make me a legend or a nest. The magpies can pluck my dream. The ghosts can have the rest.’
This is a wonderfully fresh series, small finite collections presenting snapshots of poetry. Finishing touches are being applied to the website to enable others to gaze into these poetic windows of brilliance.
J V Birch 