Raven Malley's Statement

It's all incomplete. The seasons win that battle, but these poems, published for the first time here, are the wild surprise of women, of Malley girls. The Malley man was true as he was taken, still is. He is our furious empty protagonist. And Ethel is our compleat Croydon lyricist!

Don't believe what you're told. The woman forced to take the fall is not the woman who wrote these words below. I have returned her to him and to you.

Ethel lived and fought for the words taken from her by shysters and flim-flammers when uncle Ern died and her servitude was shattered. No longer need Ethel hide behind the suburban myth. So much depends on kitchen tables and desperate midnights, when children look over the shoulders of the moon. I can see her still, my mother the loyal sister crying over the paper and secretly pulling words through the screen door of life, remembering how Ern lay sick and weary in the back room beyond. So often she would cry out: O Vegemite! O crapola!

The Malley poems resolved to give us a new literature and these brief psalms of where and how that rising future would happen are more than formal spasms or gustatory flushes. They live on, making no distinction between akam and puram but instead stride forward into their own transmigratory pact with the new, giving rhythm to their action. They are multitudes.

My mother is now flown. I still sing, not worrying about interpretative gaps. The half-eaten pizza of theory is now less cogent than its sodden crust. I present myself as ongoing research, a new bird of transgression, getting the bite back on reality, not as an echo, or a sign but unknown to unknown, the surprise of existence.

These are our wilder Hebrides. Now is the hour of the novachord!