Perihelion Goes to Oz

As I wrote in my previous post here, I'm really getting into the October / Halloween / autumnal-reminders-of-mortality mood, so when I started cruising around Web del Sol to find some good writing to send your way, I was looking for something supernatural. Poetry about ghosts or heaven or at least a good nightmare or two.

I saw that Perihelion's latest issue focuses on Australian poetry, so I figured, hey, rich tradition of aboriginal myth there; maybe someone has decided to write poetry about the dreamtime. I clicked the links and scanned through the lines: nope, no dreamtime; no, nothing too mythic in that one either; nope, still in consensus reality; enjambments aplenty, but nary a god or demon in sight.

And then I came across a non-supernatural poem that made me slow down and read it carefully, and then re-read it; it was the first of a four-poem cycle, so then I read the next one; and by the end of the fourth poem, I knew what I was going to write this post about. The poems, by Australian poet Marcella Polain, are titled "Bird, lemons," "Bird, magic," "Bird, turning," and "Bird, fish." What grabbed me right off the bat was the power of the writing in the first stanza of the first poem:

The house next door will not stop weeping.
Fat lemons rot on the tree. Cats stalk and leap in the grass.
You would fall down laughing at their spring up the wall, their inane eyes,
their mouths full of legs like grey furry fangs.

There's lots to love about the language here. Adjectives are used sparingly but well: "fat lemons," "inane eyes," and a genuinely fresh image, "grey furry fangs." The verbs are great, of course: "weeping," "rot," "stalk," "leap." But what I love most about this stanza, and most of the rest of this cycle, is how the tone shifts and shifts and shifts again. The residential comfort and mundanity of "the house next door" is immediately undercut by its "weeping." The image "fat lemons" suggests natural fecundity, but those lemons are rotting, untended. The cats seem to rescue the scene with their unforced play, but they are made into figures of fun with "inane eyes," and their casual cruelty is highlighted even as it is lampooned. Such complexity packed into such a small space--and all in uncomplicated syntax and un-flashy diction. That's good poetry.

The writing in the rest of the cycle is equally good. The eponymous Bird is a person that the narrator addresses by name in the first two poems and by implication in the last two. The poems are about the narrator's loss of Bird; we're never told exactly how this loss occurs, but death is suggested:

The crowded afternoon bus stop. A lull in traffic. Buses and cars bank up,
idling at the lights up the road, and two boys step out.
Their blue school shorts, their white shirts and faces, their shouts:
Who wants to play the death game, the magic game?

The next poem describes the narrator accompanying Bird's mother into a nightclub to look for her: "The doorman stamps a small grim reaper on the whites of our wrists. ... Sunday, in the shower, I stare at my wrist, at / the small smudge of death, weary on his staff, in the / same bruise-purple as the last dress your mother bought you."

The final poem is a cascade of beautiful, chilling images that evoke an icy feeling of loss. It's not often that I want to buy a book of someone's poetry after reading four of their poems, but that's the case here. So go visit Perihelion and get you some Marcella Polain and see what else might strike your fancy.