Wild Curious Air by Jill Jones

Recent Work Press, $19.95, 76 pp

These are detailed, sensitive poems with a ‘symposium’ scope; they step back to consider mortality and weave in astronomy, cinema, theatre, literature, and ecology.

Staying with the above poem, after delicate speculative lyricism around the universe and death, Jones abruptly switches to the quotidian: ‘Someone left a beer bottle next to the street tree.’ It’s deft choreography by a seasoned poet, but there’s more here for the careful reader – see how the word ‘tree’ emerges like a mirage from the previous word ‘street’, like the passing of light and time itself. Elsewhere, in a similar way, Jones associates off the writing itself and Baudelaire: ‘pleasures are gaps. And gasps. Things to grasp.’

It was no surprise to find references to Gertrude Stein: ‘I translate roses as multiples, a rose and a rose and a rose.’ This motif appears and disappears (sometimes Jones strikes a line through it) across the collection. Ludic language appears throughout – ‘With what portion of me be, I thank’ arrives in a poem laced in a Barthesian erotics of grammar. We find ‘apostrophe / ejaculation!’ and, elsewhere, punctuation in gardens and ‘sentences and phrases / scattered through yards and streets’. Ecology is connected to poetic craft: ‘The maple’s yellow paper blows / through the front door in veiny stanzas like ink crackling.’ In many poems there’s an aural ‘opening and closing’, a breathing involved in the meta-writing that culminates in lines like: ‘I recite a history of my own breath, which is the poem.’ The vital contemporary poems of Wild Curious Air have a circular quality – image linkages and runnels – yet each rereading feels new.

Dead Bolt by Ella Jeffery

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp

Ella Jeffery’s moonlight is ekphrastic and fifteenth century. In her début collection, Dead Bolt, it slants through a window onto ‘pale shoulders’. The scene is created out of a Jan van Eyck wedding portrait. Because of the skilful way Jeffery sets this up, we can’t help but imagine paint: shoulders ‘whetting / their blades on moonlight.’

The poem is written from the perspective of the unnamed bride, looking back mockingly, gazing with what we could call sexual agency, at this portrait of her and her ‘living venom-gland’ of a husband. Several poems focus on these early Northern Renaissance paintings. In the poem ‘Assumption’, Jeffery humanises the female subject – the Virgin Mary – in original and polysemous lines: ‘here insomnia / shakes its purse under her eyes’.

In one of the best poems in Dead Bolt, ‘Simon Schama’s The Power of Art’, ekphrasis is more ambiguous and ephemeral. Television art historian Simon Schama narrates:

Caravaggio paints –
paints himself to death (exaggeration)
runs, struggles, dies on a beach,
running after a boat
in the blue distance that’s sketching off to Rome
with his last paintings (maybe).

Such wit, whispered to the reader. And the implicit effect of drawing, the scratching distance made in front of us, is beguiling. The poem then moves between ‘yesterday’s breakfast’, ‘three months ago’ in Shanghai, ‘last year’ yawning’, and the present. It’s an accomplished manoeuvre via ‘Six o’clock darkness’ – indeed, the magic hour – television, memory, and the present in two concise stanzas.

Curiously, Jeffery flecks her expression with almost imperceptible brutality. A runner ‘chisels’ up the street, the sky ‘saws through’ the ‘split curtains’, a narrator ‘Broke the backbone / of Nietzsche’s Complete Works’, and this ambiguous nihilism lends softer moments an edge. In a poem called ‘Buying Satin Dresses at Yu Garden’, we have the line: ‘This one like a wedge / of lime on my lip.’ The sensuousness of the lyric comes through painfully; there’s no empty beauty, which is perhaps extraordinary in a début collection.

Salute by Ken Bolton

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 137 pp

On moonlight, the prolific Ken Bolton is an urbanite – he compares it to a streetlight. In his latest collection, Salute, we observe him thinking about this light for an entire page (‘always there – & like / a book design, that / you hardly notice’) until he falls asleep thinking about it, after which the light miraculously ‘peers in / –too bright–’.

Are we witness to thinking or chatting or writing or drawing or reading or dreaming or all of the above? In Salute we read lines like: ‘Now it is later / And I’m writing this’, ‘reading on the lounge’, ‘Stop talking / to myself too, maybe’, ‘Draw that’, ‘My mind whirs in neutral’, and ‘Nothing’s going / to come of this.’ It’s relaxed poetry but deliberate; the forms are meticulous. The poems’ end-lines are less about crescendo and more about melodiously set-up denouement, e.g. ‘Cath, I think, fishing’ or ‘As I would smile if Penny said it.’ You hear a jazz drummer brushing these sounds on symbols.

In the poem ‘Guilty of Staying Up All Night’ (a title Bill Evans might have conceived), Bolton measures and writes time via music – the stanza is marked by the length of one side of an LP: thirty-eight lines ending with ‘Hear it again?’ We pause before the next stanza and imagine the needle swinging back and touching down. But only a little further into the poem he delightfully unsettles us: ‘same record – Same / side – six times!’ It’s almost as though the dash is the needle and the record skips, and notice the clever pun-like enjambment of ‘side’.

You could say Bolton’s spent a career pivoting off New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul’, particularly its opening lines: ‘It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch’. In one poem, Bolton tells us he’s reading O’Hara while listening to ‘a tape quietly’ of the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter:

my fate – brrr –
                                    which is also
to Make that toast, make that
tea, & take them to you –
your cool face your warm feet –
hi

What a cute gesture to the hi-hat, this hat-tip – salute. O’Hara’s there in the self-reflection, the writer in the act of making, intimate homage, jazz rhythm. But Bolton is less surreal, more cadenced, less emotionally naked, and, like another New York School poet, Barbara Guest, more willing to explore the space of the page. Familiar contemporaries float in and out: ‘Pam’ (Brown), ‘Laurie’ (Duggan), ‘John’ (Jenkins/Forbes), plus a younger generation: ‘Sam’ (Langer) and ‘Cory’ (Wakeling). The book’s title is as much about influence as an ongoing gesture to friends who ignite these fabulous poems.