the deletions

in sydney

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in melbourne

If this sounds a bit 'blurby' it's because I wrote it as a possible back cover encomium for Melbourne poet, critic and academic, Ann Vickery's wonderful new book of poems Devious Intimacy -
In Ann Vickery's sophisticated collection of poems you can certainly "appreciate the tenor of a carefully played code" as she applies her natural critical ability with caustic lucidity. These poems cut right through cultural habit and cant and put paid to any "theoried regrets". Beneath what is said here lie enigmatic layers of what is unsaid. In these poetry games Purgatory is "full of hoons", ecopoetry offers "Terroir on tap", "higher purpose" is possibly "hire purchase", and poets can be "word-burgled". The exhilarated scepticism of Ann Vickery's cogent language is lightly modulated by occasional ironic Edwardian phrasing and formality in mementos for friends and eulogies to favourite women writers and artists. This is arrestingly incarnated poetry diffused with female luminosity.

I did 'hear' a kind of Edwardian tone in some of the poems. I suppose the distinction or binary between Edwardian and Modernist writing is entrenched but I don't think that transition was a simple one. Edwardian women did grapple with women's suffrage, class, divorce laws and so on and I think Ann's poems do that too. I don't think the traces of 'formality' she uses seem 'Victorian'. But, reluctantly, I ended up adding that hackneyed word "ironic" to conciliate my response.

Here are two poems from Devious Intimacy :


An Eye for an Eye 
             after Simone de Beauvoir

Freedom belies reciprocity. This, lovers know.
Some say her head was shaved to stave off murder,
		a kindness of sorts.  
Vengeance calls for the collaborator
to experience her own ambiguity
decamped as subject		visibly wracked or unwomaned.
Oholah, too, was once caressed by foreign hands.
Paris lays bare the ancient crime of being-in-common.
	Seduced by aesthetics  	   the punished example
After paradox there is only theory, to fail at splitting hairs.
          _________________________________

Ecopoetic Ecumenical

Purgatory is by nature hot and full of hoons.
Temperature, not temperament, a nice set of wheels.
It’s generally the assholes that get all the love poems.
Once in the greenhouse, you sat
contemplating the properties of peat, an idea of warmth 
through being trapped. A poem is a miracle of distillation
strophing mood like water from plastic, 
the fuelling station’s quick fix for the final leg.  
When it comes to a bucket list of romance, or seasonal variation,
try razing the grapes, particularly those handpicked and curlicued.  
Cling to a hundred little homilies. Leave others to their heirloom pursuits: 
love’s climate countdown is inordinately inevitable. Terroir on tap.
         __________________________________

For more information about Ann Vickery, the book, and to order a copy visit Hunter Publishers here.
____________________________________
Devious Intimacy is Ann's second collection after the booklet The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon, one of the ten deciBels series published by Vagabond Press in December 2014. That book has been well-received. Some of its poems are included in Devious Intimacy.

Dan Disney reviewed The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon in 'Cordite Poetry Review' -

Ann Vickery’s The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon hits an entirely different timbre, the poet taking up a cerebral stance in poems ticking like bombs. The title surely doffs toward Bernstein’s ‘The Klupzy Girl’, in which:
Poetry is like a swoon, but with this difference: it brings you to your senses

Instead of bombs, then, these texts are perhaps a kind of Triage. Vickery tells us in the first three lines of the book how:
    This is just fun-size confectionary,
     pet-name or a pose generator, to palliate
     the impracticalities of play

Yet these texts are neither minor nor mere confections; in the first, ‘Swoon in Miniature; or, The Youth’s Pleasing Instructor’, Vickery’s encompassing gaze lights upon the spectres of Heidegger, Shakespeare, Bowie and a host of others; in this poem-as-Wunderkammer, the critique seems anti-yob and voicing revolt, an enduring shriek of concern for what we may have become: psychically anorexic but feasting nonetheless on ‘Digestible elements of a dickybird world’. Vickery’s fractious, rebarbative style is always a sharp read:

    Wind-up lips at the fountain of youth,
    standing pixelated in the Radiant Light
    spray. I claim my five minutes
    of hegemony, you slightly more.
    Tear-streaked, we wander through
    Ovid, deep culture on your shoulder.
    Art’s shade to cast one more version.
    To build from hazelnuts a small estate,
    A measure lined with elaboration

The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon is an intertextual mosaic of glinting remnants from across canons; Vickery has sampled and remixed from tropes, dictions, genres, to create a Steinian (‘a mirror is a mirror is’) or perhaps Frankensteinian suite of texts in which affect, or vignettes thereof, seems largely abandoned in favour of traced contours of an ‘endless short circuited ghosting’ of spectacles. What seems clearest is that Vickery is not interested in taking readers prisoner with totalised accounts of individual experience; just as ‘Affection never did find a home where it wanted to stay’, these non-lyrical texts flare up as if ‘goosebumps on the earth’s curved hide’. Vickery weirdly hits all the high-notes of abjection; this poet-as-reader or reader-as-poet seems to scorn lyric traditions (truth, beauty, etc) as clichés, as nothing less than master narratives promulgated by regimes. Instead, this is a book floodlit with zeitgeistful attenuations of a changing world; its style both tracks and promotes the shift.

You can find The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon here.

This morning at Coogee Bay wreaths of kelp wrapped around my legs in the foamy wake of the waves. Breezy day, cool grey-blue ocean. I wandered up the beach to the sea pool. I swam across and then let my feet find the mossy bottom of the pool in the shady murky part under the battered concrete wall where the waves crash. Squishing squelchy toe pleasures.

Afterwards I bought a coffee at 'chish 'n' fips' and sat at a table near the park reading Claire Nashar's first book of poetry, Lake. A reading experience of being deeply and pleasantly 'fluoresced'.

As Ann Vickery says in her thoughtful and detailed introduction to the book - "Lake is a stunning debut and I expect it will itself become both impetus and node for many ... leaving a mark that is simultaneously touching, fecund and mobile."

The lake is Tuggerah Lake on the Central Coast of New South Wales. Claire includes a simple map of it that's mainly just lake and sea. The map was drawn by the cover designer Zoë Sadokierski. And the poems are like this map - mostly with just enough information, underwritten, notational, sparse with plenty of air around them. Some pages are exceptionally minimal. Some a little more 'traditional' (if that's the word - maybe 'approaching conventional' suits them better...).

Lake is dedicated to Claire Nashar's grandmother, Beryl, a geologist who spent her life researching rock composition in New South Wales. While it's a poetic account of the day the Nashars buried a loved family member it is also a profound tribute to the lake itself.

It is a beautiful work that is attentive to, among many other things, ecology, to both the effect and affect of human activity on a 'land/lake'. In her brief (three paragraph) precise preface Claire acknowledges "Long before us and long after us the area [Tuggerah] is home to the Darkinjung, Awabakal and Kuringgai peoples." She also says that she initially called this cluster of poems a 'necro-geography' because of its interest in the dead things of the lake.

This is a complex, meticulous book that uses unobtrusive yet utterly original experimentation to realise its intentions. I'll let Claire Nashar tell you more : "The poems in this book do not always start and end on discrete pages, and none have titles, although sometimes the index points a way. Muddle-headed pronouns, tenses and other grammatical disagreements reflect the porousness of subjecthood, action and time. Such disagreements are always fluoresced by subjects like love, death and life. Where there is blank space in these poems, as with most blank things, it is not empty"
_____________________________________________________
Here are two extracts, out of context, so, really, an impression -

Published by Cordite Books and available here
as usual, click on the pages/images to enlarge them

Read the new issue of Cordite, THE END here.

Featuring: Abdul-rahman Abdullah, Amanda Anastasi, Judy Annear, Ali Gumlliya Baker, Stuart Barnes, Javant Biarujia, Tony Birch, Faye Rosas Blanche, Ken Bolton, Neil Boyack, Rachael Briggs, Pascalle Burton, A J Carruthers, Louise Carter, Stephanie Christie, David Colmer, Jen Crawford, Hazel de Berg, Dan Disney, Linh Dinh, Laurie Duggan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Quinn Eades, Chris Edwards, Jacob Edwards, Anne Elvey, Michael Farrell, Toby Fitch, Caren Florance, Christopher Funkhouser, Angela Gardner, Ross Gibson, Keri Glastonbury, Phillip Hall, Philip Hammial, Natalie Harkin, Nick Harrison, Stu Hatton, Shona Hawkes, Marty Hiatt, M C Hyland, Fiona Hile, Chris Holdaway, Eddie Hopely, M C Hyland, Berni Janssen, Jill Jones, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Kit Kelen, Christopher Konrad, Jeanine Leane, Dorothy Lehane, Cassie Lewis, Kate Lilley, Melissa Lucashenko, Adrian Martin, David McCooey, Kate Middleton, Elizabeth Morton, Stephen Muecke, Michael Nardone, Claire Nashar, Ella O'Keefe, Yu Ouyang, Melody Paloma, Vanessa Page, Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Felicity Plunkett, Vaughan Rapatahana, Aden Rolfe, Mark Roberts, Reihana Robinson, Autumn Royal, Tracy Ryan, Philip Salom, Berndt Sellheim, Carin Smeaton, Maria Takolander, Sonny Rae Tempest, Darren Tofts, Simone Ulalka Tur, Ellen van Neerven, Paul Venzo, Ann Vickery, Divya Victor, Nachoem Wijnberg, Sarah St Vincent Welch, Samuel Wagan Watson, Chloe Wilson, Rob Wilson, Robert Wood, Maged Zaher and Magdalena Zurawski

young pineapple photo by Lauren Young

Mark Young's Otoliths has just published its fortieth issue.
Mark says : 'It's brought to you by the letter E — that gives you a wide range of superlatives to choose from. I'm going for Exceptional. & Early.'

In the issue you'll find Steve Dalachinsky's long sequence as collage; Emma Smith's wonderful paintings; Karl Kempton's remarkable 30-image Rune 12: Dream of the Cross; plus plays, essays, collage, prose poetry, pidgin poetry, other prose, other poetry, photographs, paintings, drawings, animated gifs, as well as some things that cannot be categorized, from a remarkable cast of creators — Susanna Lakner, Philip Byron Oakes, Sheila E. Murphy, Jack Galmitz, Richard Kostelanetz, Bill Wolak, Kyle Hemmings, Jim Meirose, Pete Spence, Marco Giovenale, Jim Leftwich, John Crouse, John M. Bennett, Louise Landes Levi, Sanjeev Sethi, Craig Cotter & Lan Yuan-Hung, Owen Vince, Steve Timm, Raymond Farr, Pat Nolan, Olivier Schopfer, Jared Chipkin, Joel Chace, Diana Magallón, Mark Cunningham, Colin Campbell Robinson, Martin Edmond, Chris Wells, David Adès, Allen Forrest, Christopher Crew, Sarah Katharina Kayß, Melanie Dunbar, Sabine Miller, Kirsten Kaschock, Bobbi Lurie, Willie Smith, Anne-Marie JEANJEAN, Joshua Baird, dan raphael, Susan Laura Sullivan, Scott MacLeod, Thomas M. Cassidy, Dennis Vannatta, Heath Brougher, Lakey Comess, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Laurel L. Perez, Patrick Cahill, Darren C. Demaree, Jesse Glass, Anne Gorrick, Shataw Naseri, Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis, Joe Milford, Shawn Haggerty, Valeria Sangiorgi, J. Crouse, sean burn, Jeff Harrison, Alberto Vitacchio, Vernon Frazer, Mark Russell, Charles Freeland, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Felino A. Soriano, hiromi suzuki, John Pursch, Carol Stetser, Andrew Taylor, Stephen C. Middleton, PT Davidson, M. J. Iuppa, Erik Blagsvedt, nick nelson, Shloka Shankar, Howie Good, Joe Balaz, Ric Carfagna, Michael Brandonisio, Cherie Hunter Day, Clara B. Jones, Tony Beyer, Carla Bertola, Susan Connolly, Volodymyr Bilyk, Anne M Carson, Stephen Nelson, Bob Heman, Michael David Conduit, Katrinka Moore, Ian Gibbins, Carey Scott Wilkerson, J. D. Nelson, Thomas O'Connell, Joseph Salvatore Aversano, David Jalajel, Lucas Smith, Marilyn Stablein, Seth Howard, Paul Pfleuger, Jr., Marty Hiatt, Deepika Chauhan & Angad Arora, & Tim Wright.

visit this link - Otoliths - to read the issue.

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