Litmus measures the world’s volatile climate and shows the reader the cracks beneath the surface of society. The tongue-in-cheek title of this poetry collection acknowledges the binaries of society and then smashes through them with strong language and an even stronger sense of line. Kerry Scuffins is a loud poet: her lines are broken for meaning and for sound, her metaphors are in your face, and she makes no apologies for inserting politics and her opinions into her poetry. Some might argue that politics are a fickle thing to use, but her work is honest in its bluntness: you may not like or agree with her, but the cards are all on the table and they’re face up.

Scuffins seems to enjoy the world: to her, poems about cats are as significant as poems about abuse. The range of this collection is impressive as is its bluntness. Scuffins does not shy away from her subject matter. Instead, she pushes forward with a sly smile. The world’s fire is as important as its bluest moments, and if anything, Litmus is a measure for the world, a space in which to meditate on its spectrum.

A standout poem from Litmus is ‘In Echuca’. This piece experiments with space and punctuation: Dickinson may have the dash but Scuffins has the slash. Here, the start-stop separation of the slashes represents the divide between boys and girls:

In Echuca/ boys are boys / and girls/
know their place / nowhere / now / here
In Echuca / birds are barred from the barrel
In Echuca / if your plumage is exotic/
better sing a very quiet song /
boys who like sex are studs /
yair ‘e ‘olds th crutchin’ record /
girls who like sex / are sluts / Gerrorf
that town bike / where anorexia/
won’t make ya nervosa / and real girls /
put fingers to lips / in bars / sshh/

Scuffins’ politics are loud; but it is her punctuation that defines her points. It’s exciting to see this poet move past storytelling or humor and really sink her teeth into poetry’s possibilities. The nuance of this poem’s punctuation and the way sounds seem as divided as the lines and the genders make this a layered text worth many a look.

Weaving the lines of poetry and politics successfully is a mighty task. This collection is consumed with the war of politics and though it is invigorating to see a poet stand up for what they believe, there are times when politics and statement overpower form and lyricism. For example, in the poem ‘Monsters’ the speaker talks about explaining that monsters do not exist to her son. The last stanza of the poem explains the son’s reaction: “Tom listened patiently / then looked me straight in the eye / and gave his reply – / ‘Soldiers are monsters’”. The point seems a bit too heavy, a bit too expected. Scuffins has a great sense of line, and it would have been nice to have seen her be more subtle. Still, it takes a poet with guts to talk of soldiers as monsters, especially in a world filled with war. Scuffins’ fearlessness is certainly not to be discounted.

It can be seen that Scuffins is aware of the honesty and bluntness of her poems. In the poem ‘Boo’, for example, she shows her self-awareness in a mock literary and academic context:

I sat in a poetry workshop once
while everyone discussed
the horse in my poem.
One ventured that it was
the spirit of Autumn.
Another, that it represented
the old world, being supplanted
and dissolved by the new.
A third suggested, Freudishly,
that the horse might be
my father.
At the end I told tem
“He was a horse I had,
bay, fifteen-two.
His name was Boo.”

This is one of the wittier poems in the collection. Scuffins is coy: “Freudishly” sounds too similar to “foolishly” for the coincidence to be mere accident. The poem’s title, the horse’s name, seems to be a cry to the poetry workshops and the critics and to the literary notion of harping upon metaphor. The humour of the piece is as intoxicating as its slyness with word play.

When Scuffins is not weighed down with wars to rage against, her poems have a wildness worth exploring. The quieter poems of the collection can sometimes be lost in the shuffle, especially when placed near the louder or more humorous pieces, but they should not be discounted. In fact, these poems sometimes have the most moving or memorable of images and lines. For example, in ‘Shadowland’ Scuffins writes:

Stars are eyes. Trees breathe
tiny sighs. Here
I’m light years
from my race. Divorced.

Here, the language is intoxicating and more subtle; and yet it is also vivid and memorable. The poem’s politics are understated, layered in with the line breaks (e.g. the smartly enjambed line: “from my race. Divorced”). When Scuffins allows herself to breathe in the darkness, the shadows she creates are perhaps even more evocative and moving than the words she shouts at the top of a cliff.

Many of the poems are flippant and laugh-out-loud funny. Kerry Scuffins is a poet to watch for: she isn’t afraid to go knee-deep into the muck and to staple the carcass of the society’s demons to the wall. The poems in this collection may deal with serious subject matters, but they are going to shine a light on the humour behind the breakdowns.

Lisa Bower is a poet and currently lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

According to AUSTLIT: The Australian Literature Resource, Connie Barber’s fourth collection of poetry, Between Headlands, has only been reviewed on one occasion by any print or on-line journal in this country since its publication. I am surprised by this lack, as I believe Barber has an established writing career and a public presence. Barber deserves a greater critical reception than she currently enjoys, and hopefully this substantial book will further establish her already published oeuvre.

Between Headlands is an elegantly-produced collection of poems. The book is divided into five subject groups: ‘The Great Ocean and The Sea’, ‘Opposition and Openings’, ‘Those Mysterious Invasions’, ‘No More People’ and ‘Passages’. The poems represent matters philosophical, linguistic and elemental and include sonnets and less formal prose poems.

The front cover features a painting, ‘American Bay, Kangaroo Island’, by the author, announcing her interest and fascination with the world of nature. Some of the poems contrast ecological observation and individuals resisting or conversing with the land. In ‘Westernport’, for example:

The suit and tie, slightly overfed,
sedentary, shabby in a satisfied
suburban way

This “suburban way” ignores or resists an appreciation of “sea grass beds, [and] nurseries for fish”. The male narrator from the city is closed off to the elemental rhythms of the ocean, disavowing the significance of “lamp shells breeding as they did in/Cambrian, Silurian, [and] Devonian years”. “[B]ehind his foolproof door”, he does not think much of these ancient breeding grounds, these signs of fecundity. Changing seasons is a concern of much of Barber’s poetry, as can also be seen in ‘In Silence’:

The paddock’s ripe heads
turn gold to shimmer silver.
Spring’s green
fades into gritty earth.

The seasons move inexorably on, summer replacing spring. The simplicity and conciseness of these evocative images show the primal rhythms of the seasons, the constant change revealing the secrets of transfiguration: regeneration becomes decay becomes regeneration.

Barber is drawn to movement, to the pulses exploring the patterns in the luminal zones between elements such as day and night, the ocean and the shore. Poems such as ‘The Edge of the Land’ and ‘The Flatlands and The Sea’ explore these zones effectively. ‘Edge’ describes the action of a storm in a beautiful, luminous language, with similes like “the wind,/cold and sharp as hail” and the shimmering simplicity of the words describing the paths of energy around and through “the world’s flow”. The “flow” of the ocean creates “new land’ by “leave[ing] samplers: drowned birds,/shearwater’s legs bluer than the sky, the delicate curve/ of the egret’s golden bill”. The effects of the storm engender communication, and compel the narrator to “whisper to the sea”. The awe that the “people of the shoreline” experience reinforces the insignificance of humanity.

Many of these poems represent a life lived, a life in which the passing of the years and the tentativeness of relationships and experiences provide real intuition into the fragility of existence. In ‘A Year Not Long Enough’, a moving evocation exploring grief, th author ruminates:

a year since death cut
day’s imperative to find time
to care to count moments.

Death breaks time, cutting across the daily patterns in an individual’s life. Grief creates a different sense: time is cut-up, life is disordered. In this poem of three stanzas, the absence of punctuation constructs feelings of slowness, of rapidity, of upside-down events. It is as if death maligns time with the hands of the clock moving frenetically around the face: stopping, moving, stopping then moving again: “It is forever time that does not count”.

The trope of temporality is a significant presence in these poems. In ‘All Hallows Eve 31st October’, the residual elements of Northern Hemisphere pagan/nature cultures migrate to the Southern Hemisphere: “the old/hawthorn hedge, immigrant/from another hemisphere, a shabby memory/of early spring, the first cicadas”. This is the imposition of settler cultures in colonial countries like Australia. Boundaries dissolve, the seasons are reversed, summer in the Southern Hemisphere is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the light and dark are turned upside-down: “Slow dark and a changing moon allow entry/to an older darker honouring the soul’s need”.

Connie Barber speaks from her heart, her lines echoing a redemptive power through effective similes, concise images and a powerful simplicity that has remained in the imagination of this reader. Five Islands Press must be praised for the publication of this fine collection of poetry.

Peter Mitchell writes poetry, short fiction and literary criticism and a range of journalism.

To speak of Judith Bishop’s poetry is perhaps to speak, necessarily, of the image. Of course, in the context of 20th century poetics, this term carries within it an unfortunately thorny and convoluted lineage. From Ezra Pound’s use of the concept against the Georgians to Ponge’s against the Surrealists, the image has always constituted a controversial node, its problems and paradoxes traversing diverse ideological mires of competing poetic modernities.

With reference to Bishop’s poetic, however, I mean this term in its most simple sense, namely: the presence here of an associative and correlative richness, a passing before our eyes of ever more richly coloured verbal templates. The range of metonymical and metaphorical energy of Event seems sometimes almost unbounded. It is a poetics in which “pallid/ eye of winter noon” translates the more familiar signifier “the sun”, and “a net of gulls” gives a tortuous rendition of the common notion of “a flock”.

Bishop’s dense imagistic encoding is often reminiscent then of the luxuriantly ambiguous gestures of poets from the English Metaphysics through to Saint-John Perse and Pablo Neruda. Yet, with this said, it is also important to ask, in the specific context of this poetics: what, precisely, is such imagistic brilliance for? It is a question curiously pertinent for Bishop who, as the proficient translator of the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, must be familiar with Bonnefoy’s extreme exigency regarding the need to closely monitor – and sometimes actively preclude – excesses of “obscuring” figurative flourish.

Does an image reveal the real, or rather provide a site for lexical aggrandizing? It is a question Bonnefoy himself asks – of other poetries, as well as his own – throughout his poetic development, in continually more subtle and penetrating ways. Moreover, the question seems all the more appropriate in the framework of Bishop’s poetic, given the fact that the image is not so much here a site of Poundian condensation, as its inverse: namely, a space of lexical effusion and excrescence, expanding always outwards into ever more notable special-effects.

The known Poundian modus operandi of “dichten = condensare” thus almost becomes here “dichten = estendere”. But if Bishop does not employ the image in the sense of a nascent Imagism, it still seems a basis of a poetics which takes as its possible starting point – and even as its end event-horizon – the framing of a world in a series of vivid perceptive instances.

For what should we say of an expression such as “pallid/ eye of winter noon”? It sounds good. It sounds, to be frank, beautiful. It may have the right to exist because of this; but it is also interesting to ask if it functions beyond this: if it establishes greater nodes and networks of perceptive penetration. In short, if it accomplishes anything else. “[A] spider”, Bishop writes, “has cellared spring rains in its body”. Here, we can only conclude that the choice of such a verb – so original and so precise – is at once impressive and revelatory. It seems to take us quickly into the very workings of a being and an environment. But at other times, this associative register seems too self-sufficient, too autotelic, too simply a demonstration of praxis or technique. Moreover, despite the vivid, occasional beauty of such fragments, there is sometimes also here a slight straining after-effect: a desire to eke every last drop of resonance from one spider’s single, simple ontology.

This effect is, strangely, at once deeply impressive and also rather unsettling. When we read in Bishop, for instance, that “a child’s foot stutters/ like a just-fledged bird”, we may simultaneously be astonished at the inventiveness and perceptivity of these mots justes, while also being simultaneously aware that the poet is strutting her associative stuff. Of course, this explicit awareness and display of technique is in no way necessarily bad. Indeed, perhaps we should even ask ourselves if this asking of Bishop’s imagistic vivacity “yes, but what is it for?” is not too utilitarian, too functional or entirely teleological an approach.

Poetry, being that form of discourse where justifications are often, and thankfully, less important than the larger ontology and autonomy of the work, it is no doubt sometimes reductive to ask of a poetic: why is this element here? What is its general justification? Its greater goal? This may be entirely applicable here, given first the undeniable beauty of these poems, but secondly the fact that most of them function admirably beyond their associative scaffolds. This said, if we examine more closely what I feel to be one or two of Bishop’s less successful poems, I believe we’ll see why this question may be warranted.

A good example of the contrasting paradigm I am attempting to describe is the poem ‘Late In The Day’, where a salient and constantly surprising lyricism cakes a fundamentally linear, and entirely conventional, narrative device. Let’s say first of all that ‘Late In The Day’ is an incarnation par excellence of the infamous genre of the “dead-animal-poem”. But Bishop’s praxis here is so utterly accomplished that we are liable to forget the formulaic arc of its premise and narrative progression. I will quote the poem in full, as I feel it ably represents some of the assets, but also the defects, of Judith Bishop’s poetic:

Arrives the moment of contradiction. A rat
has sown its leanness in the earth;
a hawk, blue stencil, floats low across the field of hay,
resembling, as you see it, the
brushed hair of a child.

Wind has ferried the hawk south
toward a swatch of pines.
There, a boy with shaky hands
shoots her down with a stone.

               In his fingers
he gently takes the threads of her entrails.
His eyes reflect a sky sharp as water
from a spring.

In late-shadowed pines,
her young incline toward the sun.
A screen of white down
lies aggrieved by wind at dawn.

There is, for me, a sort of earnest questing after-effect here, a concerted striving to create an impact which seems almost, at times, to become a slight straining. In short, the poem is really trying very hard to make its desired impact. The tenor is laboring to impress, and in the darkened audience, we are perhaps slightly afraid that this voice may break.

But amidst this straining are such moments too of vivid, concentrated beauty, that we are apt to forgive such extreme exertion: “a hawk, blue stencil, floats low across the field of hay/ resembling, as you see it, the/ brushed hair of a child ”. Until the second fold of this double-folded metaphor, I remained slightly unsatisfied. Hawk as blue stencil, while inventive, seemed not quite enough; but the extension of this comparison – its sudden expansion and effulgence into a new associative and emotive universe – with the introduction of yet another layer to this analogous world, casts the fragment in a new, singular light.

So much for the mastery of an associative praxis. In spite of this imagistic control and inventiveness, however, the question persists whether the poem does not remain itself, in the end, somewhat too formulaic. “A screen of white down/ lies aggrieved”: this is eloquent, but maybe the poet Bishop has so ably translated, Yves Bonnefoy, would ask if it is anything else. Of course, there is perhaps little new one can do with the narratological limitations of “child in woods finds dead bird”, though Bishop perhaps makes the absolute best of her material.

I would not be spending such time enumerating what I see to be the slight defects of this generally strong collection, if these aspects of Bishop’s poetic did not seem rather recurrent. The sentimental dead-animal narrative recurs here once more, for instance, in ‘Don(tilde)a Marina: Part I’ :

It was my name-day. I was five or six. But I remember
                this –
I broke the neck of a baby hummingbird.
Flung from the nest
for faults divined by the hen: a twisted wing bone,
an ill-formed bladder?
I saw its throat wobble by the silk-cotton tree.
The sky was candled by the moon.
My hands moved, a doubled arc.
I held my palms out for the gods, the silken
down a little blood adhering,
               and I thought –
Now I’ll never be that wrinkled belly in the dust.

These are the less inventive moments, however, of an otherwise impressive writing. Such a poem starts, to my sense, flatly, and we are worried where it will go; but then Bishop goes somewhere truly intriguing. Lesser poets would no doubt have fallen into the abyss of the sentimental fixation, where Bishop perhaps briefly stumbles, before pulling herself out of such strangely ecstatic sentiment into something more complex and ambiguous:

Delicate and transfixing :
“Storms build across the skies. The rats have come
to take their young to higher ground,
biting gently on their necks.”

This is Bishop at the height of her technical brilliancy, and it is present here in swathes. The ut pictura poesis of “Rembrandt’s Presentation in the Temple” is worthy, for instance, of the highest Ashberian vein of revelatory ekphrasis, and never seems reducible to a mere enumeration or elaboration of visual stimuli:

Their hands press forward
to the pole of this event, dark-burred
in its print, pivot of a skein
of strokes, like the strands

This is a poetic mind at ease in language’s largesse, in which the fine markings of a brush in oil are “like the strands of winter hay/ a swallow trails”. And thankfully, here, there is much more post-facto (post-imago) processing, reflection, and formalizing, than to Bishop’s less successful moments of lyrical effusiveness. Bishop seems to probe here then, beautifully and brilliantly, the glittering surface of a glimpsed, possible “event”.

This is perhaps nowhere so evident as in the very strong ‘Savonarolas’, in which we find, as well as this imagistic flair, a great deal of a posteriori process and penetration:

Would I die for one who lived in the shadow
of Giotto’s stocky portals,
belly red-scaled as a duomo, brow
a fount of black, horse-hair bristles, cypresses?

Would I live for one who died in the noon-glare
of a secular hour, vanity’s firebrand,
forgetting a fragrant bread, the sweetest wine, the thrust
                                of rosemary –
thirsting for water?

Oh, but together, they’ll make a ghost of me.

This is impressive in so many ways: its formal symmetry, which still allows for the sharp turn of its parabola, gives onto a final line opening onto new perspectives of ontological reflection. That first stanza is as rhetorically dense as any of Ronsard’s physical descriptions in Les Amours. Later, the poem seems almost Petrarchan in the sharp torque of that last line’s volta.

For every less inspiring variation, then, on “a screen of white down/ lies aggrieved”, we find many others signs of a poetic intelligence here which proves more completely successful. Take, for instance, the brief, unassuming phrase which we read in ‘The Indifferent’, and which we are liable to pass over at first reading: “palimpsest of sands”. There are few poets today capable of finding such an expression: such precision of address mixed with ambiguous evocation.

And these instances of insufficient penetration I have mentioned remain, in the end, quite rare. It is no doubt this which makes the separate, perceptive ‘events’ of Bishop’s writing so rewarding. It is no doubt also this which allows it to overcome, mostly, its risks.

Nicholas Manning is the editor of The Continental Review and teaches comparative poetics at the University of Strasbourg, France.

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Golda Finch has been an Australian artist-in-residence across the globe and she has only recently returned from an extremely brief visit to Baghdad.

poets x, y, & z at different times. we talk of stray things –
x mentions Hawkesbury Country more than once, as if you can’t
walk through it, not without feeling an owner’s ‘presence’.

y & i imagine who would win in kickboxing bouts,
the tough-looking poets or the wise? (no rule emerges)

& z introduces someone, then pauses, stares at an adjacent wall,
quite forgetting the norms. an iconoclast. i don’t know what to say:

anonymity is grand but still i love to fix a sly certain stretch of days
(a la Schuyler). though the days are not consecutive, three is a fine number.
i’ll be in the present, feigning indifference towards a terrible driver.

my poor faculty to retort drifts out the car window,
my face noting a lack of sun, keys jangling morosely. that’s cool.

then you’ll be studying images of marine-life on a laptop, outdoors,
doing whatever ‘thing’ is in question by proxy. still in the present.

(you are you)

catching a titanic haul to feed the family is the fallacious banter, & yet
there is nothing like the peace before this evolutionary gambit

(modernly named children shoulder rods & pro-scooters their faces dripping with saccharine & hate of things other they’ll nod curtly in the
curt distance

(as if the history of nods & that canon were nothing))

finally the glaze-over as colour grips a substation there, &
we gaze longingly at one sun plus one cloud plus the way
‘dazzling’ sort of dances along a gravel curve fronting some water,

all in keeping with the time: all so particular to there,
the blanket antithesis of here. the real man vs beast action.

it’s where you might almost see the ghost of St. Augustine
ambling along the banks… except i’ve only got a Bega vista to use,

or some comet-skies of Narooma, or the leaf-green Tilba trap.
(secretly poet x & i do battle for ‘Riverina Country’
where Cod would eye you if they could)

we were driving the incomplete road to Albury anyway when
y commented on the specificity of ghosts – it’s an unremarkable stretch.
petrol-stations seizing up & places bypassed. you wouldn’t understand.

sure, your friends will get personal (despite studying rhetoric):
the speculative literature of personal revelation being just so intoxicating,

in that ‘there is hope after all’ way. it’s not only substations though,
go-cart attendants call out names & the ‘curt’ kids navigate erratic ramps:

just as stop-start as the conversational play of z: & with that:
your past life with fish, else the c-grade tennis trophy, it’s all in a photograph
& a message on the back appears to be scrawled, in a scrawled hand

‘jim & frank 89’, else a polaroid x, y, & z… it doesn’t matter.
like real men coaxing valid responses from landmark landrovers,

petrol fumes & bird-sounds take you back to memorised land,
the exact numbers so spatially ill-determined, moral as August.

i’m nothing like the other men & that keeps the plovers well away.
when you mention ‘property’ (in a poem) three crows wail a symbolic rave:

it’s you expressing a note of doubt (x a smudge off in the distance) &
the hamlet we aspire to a collection of insulated evils (men escape to ‘weekender’).

for now i’ll reflect the lot in the slower breath after toil: a tractor balanced briefly between long sky & uncertain rows of growth: ordered or otherwise nothing much is

indicative:

it’s not your problem but here you’ll feature large: like the birds you turned ‘painstaking’ into a verb for, they loom in the adventures of x, y, z, as located by me
in a series of landscapes we plain zip through.

Invariably described as an ecological disaster,
fire ants are the evolved antithesis of market
garden poets. Recently, a lyrebird’s corpse
was found littered with crimson pustules
in bushland adjoining a continental herb patch.
The ants infiltrated this land obscured in cargo
containers, cleared by Quarantine, some of whose
scribes have since been uncovered as acolytes.

They spread out, heedless too of bush poets’ pleas.
Now swarming in countless colonies of numbers
of up to half a million, with a retractile stinger
that can deliver anaphylactic shock to the
domestic gardener, they fear none. The literati
who fled in time are still laughing their heads off.

Its plumage is made of melody, a jingle
of colour shifting through all the seasons of the bush.
Its eyes hold the glint of water
running over a coral reef adjoining
a white beach where a single white woman
reclines in her red bikini.

Here in the heartland, the alleys of burrawong
sound with its jukebox selection of songs.
Business leaders who pass in pilgrimage
swoon in their woven suits. Some visit
only in conference-vision & wake up in boardrooms
their blissful faces enraptured by sweat.

Of course like its siblings this poet
is sustained by belief – though its purpose
is to sustain belief. It extols lifestyle
over life & is effectively invisible,
the domain of pure prophesy.

Its territory is the site of anthropomorphic excursions
& reams of market research, which
are whispered in eucalypt leaves that fall
like knuckle bones & blood. Here forms
a cartography of desire, real & potential
daily, the bird offers such & such advice.
In all the outreaches of the city,
signposts are scratched with its modulating Logos,
beautiful construct, plentiful with myth.
Truly, it is a poet among poets.
Even the airwaves resound.

for the Hillbillies

Swamp hen, I say, before we choke
& throttle over the mercury
to observe sublimation at work:
mangrove eclipsing to argon.
The tinnie curves like an outfield.
Another drag puts Fred on the floor,
phosphor sluicing in our wake.
Alright, be shit without reflectors.
There’s nothing soft about a midnight
tinnie ride. Unless you count
two perfectly executed doughies,
shout-outs to the newly fucked
& the sunken bell of a metal drum
when cables bump off the prop.