Hamesh Wyatt reviews
Dark Bright Doors, by Jill Jones, The Moonmen, by Anna
Livesey and Mapping the Distance, by Ingrid Horrocks.
DARK BRIGHT DOORS
Jill Jones
Wakefield, $24.90, pbk
In 1992, Australian poet Jill Jones released a stunning debut
collection of poems The Mask and the Jagged Star
(Hazard).
From "Boys go crazy": ...
But boys go crazy
all over everyone else,
generous with their despair,
unloading their loneliness in public places.
Maybe, they're not born like that.
Maybe, they're just enlisted too soon for the war.
Their war.
Against loneliness.
But if bullets are tears,
it's no sin to cry alone sometimes.
Her latest collection of poems, Dark Bright Doors,
continues to explore the road less travelled.
Among the 70 poems are ones titled "Regarding Pain",
"Sorry I'm Late", and "Getting Burned": ...
Come out to play, you will get
splinters
you have not the stomach for but
there is
more hunger than you understand,
no longer
is there time for you if the plants
won't grow.
You can say your finger was not on the trigger
the gun went off anyway.
Her poems can be violent.
They are all haunted by the same brutal truths about love and
hope and the wedges that age, distance and human frailty
drive between them.
Dark Bright Doors exudes wide-eyed angst and a sense of
discovery that's hard to put across in prose.
There seems to be something less than perfect in her work,
but that's all right.
It still seems to make sense.
THE MOONMEN
Anna Livesey
VUP, $25, pbk
Another impressive debut collection a few years ago was Anna
Livesey's Good Luck (Victoria University Press, 2003).
She comes from Bill Manhire's school of writers - young,
attractive, intelligent and female.
Gone are the poems about the 1931 Napier earthquake or
thoughts on colonisation as in "South Seas Analecta".
Her new collection, The Moonmen, is a bunch of short,
clipped poems that are deeply personal.
Some talk of her time spent in the American Midwest.
The last section of this slim volume concentrates on
responding to her mother's illness.
"What License Issued You Away?":
Things have changed since you were with us.
We no longer call a spade a spade.
Now we say you are crazy and try to believe it.
Now we say 'she loved us then', and 'there can be no
return'.
Connection, light as sunlight through clouds;
as lights flick across valleys, across gorse.
There is no way of saying we are sorry,
save to hold you.
There is no way to hold or save you.
Easily imagined, instantly recognisable scenes are set up
quickly by Livesey.
Her poems morph into different shapes and take strange turns
to keep things diverse, but still extremely focused.
She strikes plenty of wistful notes.
For someone so young she knows how to deliver odes to
nostalgia, regret and loneliness. While Good Luck flitted
between being hauntingly and heart-achingly vulnerable with
masterful control, The Moonmen is a warm, affectionate book
of poems.
Her "warts and all" attitude works.
This is another confident step forward.
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