The chapbook presents two short sequences, ‘Six Improvisations on the River’ and ‘A Song of Praise’, poems which are meditative, spare and sombre and which seem to move immediate experience into realms of the archetypal, carried by ‘words shelled and husked and cast about / upon the stream to grow the crust / of drifting meanings’. There’s little to lighten a view of existence where:

Harmony-ruled, time frets
and plods inevitable
for days and nights beyond
the might of number.

The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers, Tim Thorne’s collection of twenty poems (Shoestring Press, $7.25 pb, 24pp), is also concerned with the dark sides of experience but in a very different form. The street talk and colloquial rhythms of poems with titles like ‘The Hoon’s Soliloquy’, ‘Bouncer’ and ‘Rat’s Song’, are a poetic world away from the formality and sonorous cadences of Tsaloumas. The themes are crude and painful: the lives of those (especially the young) on the edge of today’s urban society, a world of drugs, drink, prostitution and violence:

Where do they live? Where do their kids live?
Sao Paolo, Flinders Street Station, Dagenham:
You don’t need to stay at school to learn that kind
of geography. Same planet, same street.

Thorne’s poems are bleak but powerful; they’ve avoided polemic and simply show that ‘Some lives have big patterns not discernible / to those who are always on their own hot beach’.

Island Press Cooperative has published Carolyn Gerrish’s second collection, Learning to Breathe Under Water (79 pp). In five groups of poems, Gerrish shows her impressive poetic versatility and her growing strengths. The poems are about the raw spots, the exposed nerves of personal and family relationships, about faith and doubt and alienation, about the sheer plod of existence. It’s confronting and challenging, not comfortable poetry.

The short sequence ‘The Family Way’ (with its epigraph ‘Your kinsmen are often farther from you than strangers.’) is a disturbing and evocative series of meditations on alienation, working through some striking and sometimes shocking images:

Your parents met you, their necks
extended like the trunks of fig trees.
On your father’s face are brown
medallions like a peeled building.
He rubs his hands like winged masks
over his face, when
he ears it’s like water straining down
a plug hole.

The substantial core of the book is in ‘The Family Way’, and the sequence ‘Where There be Monsters’ (again with an eloquent epigraph, Pascal’s ‘The eternal silence of these infinite space fills me with dread.’) Here Gerrish’s world is dark and dysphoric, as in ‘Red-Neck Town’:

she moves in the Valley where the
land lies dreaming
& things separate like the whites &
yolks of eggs
(the sawing of bird in trees
tachycardia of water meters
a snail trailing through a mystery of
weeds) & behind
each safety-door someone watches
for hints of
subversion of the Quotidian & the
space between things
gets clogged – that’s not right! …

Among Gerrish’s strengths are her wit, wry self-deprecation and humour, all of which control and balance the preoccupation with the dark and terrible. I became a fan forever on turning the page to find, as conclusion to the otherwise harrowing ‘Monsters’ sequence, ‘Poet’s Answer to the Oscars’ –

& I would like to thank
my family
(for ignoring me)
mu current lifestyle
(with its poverty angst
& constant crises)
& my lack of love
for creating
just the right
emotional deprivation
& creative tension
to allow me
to write these poems

A touch of light in the darkness.

But what, I wonder, would Geoff Page make of this? His collection of light verse, published in Canberra by Polonius Press, is prefaced by a pretentious authorial Foreword (‘The pleasures of light verse are finite but real.’!) in which, with a flourish of quote marks, he dissociates the light from the ‘serious’: light verse has generally not been included ‘in my “normal” collections for fear of “confusing the issue” or appearing “lightweight”’. He then goes on to associate himself with those ‘normal’ poets such as Eliot, Pope and Byron who indulged in the odd light verse.

I found the light verse in Mrs Schnell arrives in Heaven (by Geoff Page, Polonius Press, $17.95 pb, 56 pp) like the proverbial lead balloon. It was mostly smug, uninventive and unfunny with many of the verses betraying their origins as contributions to academic staff-club blokey, boozy lunches. You probably needed to be there at the time … like the book’s dedicatees David Campbell and Bob Brissenden ‘who laughed’. I didn’t.

I did laugh, or at least smile, quite often through my reading of Stingers (by Kristin Henry and Doris Leadbetter, Pariah Press, $14.05 pb, 108pp) which, as Dorothy Porter comments in her Foreword, is ‘a timely reminder that poetry can be both fun and very deadly’.

Two popular Victorian poets, Kristin Henry and Doris Leadbetter, have cemented personal friendship with a shared book, aptly titled Stingers, published by Pariah Press and containing Henry’s What If The Plane Goes Down? and Leadbetter’s The Fat Lady’s Song. The exigencies of poetry publishing mean that we’re seeing more such shared volumes, in some of which the disparities between poets create an odd discordance. But Stingers, with its collections by two compatible and complementary poets, is a satisfying and interesting book.

Kristin Henry is justly renowned as a reader, seducing audiences with the lingering ‘slow, slow music’ of a Tennessee accent. In What If The Plane Goes Down? many of the poems almost speak themselves, as if written for the voice rather than the eye on the page. This isn’t a problem but it can occasionally produce a certain breathy feel, and allow some irritating folksy colloquialisms … but she’s still the only poet I know who can get away with lines like:

In the beginning
we were as bright as sunrise
as big as God. So gorgeous
people in the streets took bites of us
when we went walking.

What If The Plane Goes Down? is Henry’s third collection, and it shows an impressive development from the tentativeness and lightness of her earlier work. There are still some poems that I’d call squishy – like ‘The M Word’ and ‘St Kilda Song’ – but the firmer and tighter lines and rhythms of poems like ‘To A Son’, ‘Staying Home’ and ‘Knotting My Dreams With Silk’ have a powerful impact (which may be what Dorothy Porter described as ‘devious lyricism’?). However, it’s ‘Unnatural Kindness’, a sequence of fifteen poems forming the solid centre of the collection, which shows Henry’s mature strength and confidence and confirms her achievements as a serious poet. It was spine-tingling reading – rare in poetry – and I’m still savouring lines like ‘We sit for an hour / the only noise a hum / from this mix of perfect things.’ and ‘one minute he was / looking hard into my eyes . and the next gone / from behind his own.’ Again rarely in poetry, one eagerly anticipates the next book from this lively and accomplished poet,

‘Mordant’ was the word which kept flashing in my mind as I read The Far Lady’s Song, Doris Leadbetter’s first collection of verse. It’s not a word I use much but it was strongly suggested by the waspish wit and diabolical audacity of Leadbetter’s diverse range of themes.

As Tennessee still sings in Kristn Henry, so Yorkshire candour and pragmatism stalk through Leadbetter’s poems, bringing flights of fancy to down-to-earth conclusions. In ‘Where Dancers Move’, for example, the poem begins with the lovely lines ‘Between music and the stillness of listening / is the space where dancers move,’ continues in similar mood to ‘music scrapes a nerve / or blows soft imperatives into tilted heads’, then abruptly shifts into anti-climactic conclusion:

The men in the audience conceal
homophobia
behind respect for tumescent thigh
muscles.
They wonder at the sweat, at
weightless lifts,
and if there’s bran in the jockstraps.

This typifies much of Leadbetter’s work and hints at  reluctance or diffidence about taking herself seriously as a poet. Or that the chance to play with words and readers, or to make caustic (and acute) comment, has been irresistible. This sets up tensions in her poems as well as making her an ambivalent poet. Sometimes she tries too hard, becomes too wordy, too smart (‘Twirling made the fluffy hem shed a flirt of swansdown, / twisting in the air like diasporic seeds / confident of a soft landfall on nurturing soil.’) In other less than successful poems she sets off vigorously on a narrative course, has a good time along the way, then feels the need to wrap up the story with a neat conclusion.

But when she curbs the impulse to ‘rave and rant and / strut the stage’ and comes to grips with poetry, Leadbetter reveals a formidable poetic talent. In her best poems like ‘Evenings’, ‘Father’, ‘Ageing’ and ‘Racing at the Beach’, the light and dark are contrapuntal rather than discordant and the results are moving and satisfying – exemplified, perhaps, in these lines from the title poem which fittingly concludes the book:

Break the bones, and spread the ashes
under a lemon tree and roses.
Let me at last bring scent and savour
to the weary lives of those who loved me.
When I die I want to be an ordinary
memory.

---

Six Improvisations on The River
By Dimitris Tsaloumas
Shoestring Press, $7.25 pb, 20 pp

The Streets Aren’t For Dreamers
By Tim Thorne
Shoestring Press, $7.25 pb, 24 pp

Learning to Breathe Under Water
By Carolyn Gerrish
Island Press (PNA), 79 pp

Mrs Schnell Arrives in Heaven
By Geoff Page
Polonius Press, $17.95 pb, 56 pp

Stingers
By Kristin Henry and Doris Leadbetter
Pariah Press, $14.05 pb, 108pp