Heather Taylor Johnson – ‘Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town’

Reviewed by Subhash Jaireth

It is, I think, a mere coincidence that I started reading this book of beautiful poems just a week after I had reread Osip Mandel’shtam’s gem of an essay ‘Conversation about Dante’. Now, I know that I shouldn’t have done that; should have given more time to let the words of my favourite poet fly away. But it has happened and there is no escaping.

Poetry (like any other art form), to paraphrase Mandel’shtam, doesn’t describe or show the world around us but ‘plays’ with it. The Russian word he uses is razigrivaet and not igraet (play), emphasising, I think, the fact that this act of playing involves tricks; that poetry and thereby poets seem to have fun with the world, or perform with it as if he or she were an actor and the world a mere prop. And because it is a performance, it opens a gap, a sort of cleavage between the world and the poetical word; the relation of equivalence between the two is disturbed. Perhaps that is why any attempt to retell or verbalise poetry is not only misplaced but also imprudent. If a poem can be described, Mandel’shtam argues, it means the poem wasn’t a poem, and that poetry had escaped from it like a disenchanted lover leaving the bed unslept and the sheet unstained. Fortunately there is enough poetry still living in many of the poems of this debut collection by Heather Taylor Johnson.

The collection has forty-eight poems of variable length, shape and style. It starts with a lean but crisp poem, ‘Salida’. Its first line, ‘You have always been’, and the final line, ‘We have always been’, establish the existential certainty of the world the poet and the poems wish to celebrate; the joy is in their dialogic co-existence. From this assurance are born poems which in the words of Jill Jones (cited on the blurb) celebrate the ‘everydayness, the ongoingness of living’, or which as Libby Hart suggests (also on the blurb) ‘sing praises of the natural world and domesticity’, of ‘love, food, shelter and belonging.’

There are poems which look slim, almost anorexic, on the page and there are some which are spread out on the page like lusciously-hipped damsels. For me the slim poems work better. I like the economy of words with which they achieve their effect. Some more wordy ones, like ’14^th Rebirthday’, read like prose-poems or even poetic prose.

Being letters to a lover, all poems represent first-person monologues. However in two poems, ‘An Intimate Discussion’ and ‘Another Intimate Discussion’, two first-person voices (the lover and the loved-one) engage in a dialogue where words are marked in quotes. I would have liked to see more poems of this kind in the collection. Their precision, tonality and simple beauty of images add sculptural clarity and sharpness.

In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes notes that as a lover what is central to me ‘… is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.’ The love in these poems seems to lack this tension. The desire which Barthes alludes to adds grief, and melancholy to the voice. Strangely these poems skip over these feelings. I think the voice of a lover utterly confident and assured about his/her love overshadows every feeling. I would have preferred some vulnerability in the voice, a tinge of betrayal, a gesture towards the potential of failure.

These poems are letters to a lover rather than letters of love. There is one poem which demonstrates shades of vulnerability. The poem is ‘Raspberries’. ‘If I could be summer I would open my leaves’, it begins, and unfolds the erotic power of words and images flooding the page and mind of the reader. But the trick is in the word If, which I read not merely as a rhetorical device but as a question posed by the lover, as if she knows that she isn’t that summer that would summon ‘bushels or raspberries’ for her lover to feed him the sweetness of her juices.

I like the poem ‘Obamacare’ for two reasons; firstly because it is different from the rest in tonality of expression and secondly because it captures the musicality, the chanting rhythms, of Obama’s and thereby Martin Luther King’s speech well. In this poem the personal and the public come into co-being and the domesticity of life opens its door, flowing out and letting the world pour in.

To lovers of poetry who want to read this book, I suggest they read it more than once, because I am sure with each reading the hold of at least some of them would grow. That’s how good poetry needs to work.

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Subhash Jaireth has published stories, essays and poetry in Australian and international magazines and journals. His book To Silence, a collection of three fictional autobiographies, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2011, and his novel After Love will be published by Transit Lounge next month.

 

Interview with Tim Collins

In 2009 Ilura Press intern Lana Rosenbaum travelled up to Brisbane to interview Tim Collins, the author of the moving poetry collection The Crooked Floor published by Ilura Press.

LR: Are you involved in much literary/poetry culture, and do you attend poetry readings/festivals?
TC: I was quite involved in the early days. I was one of the founding members of the QLD poets. We were four guys and a girl, and we started up the QLD poets which was a very aggressive poetry movement in Brissy. And like a lot of those early organizations, it died out. In those days I was very active with public poetry, poetry on buses and on trains. Nowadays I’m not so involved. I just don’t like the stuff that’s out there. I much prefer to lock myself away and do my own thing and when I do come out there has to be a reason. Like today is a special day. Although I come here [The Queensland Museum] a lot, I thought this is going to be nice. So there is more than just coming in here. I wandered around, looked at the art. It’s not like that all the time with two kids and life and rushing around. I don’t always have the time. Zachary is 21 and Bridget is 13.

LR: Do your children write?
TC: Zachary has no interest whatsoever in it but Bridget is very creative, very arty and spirited. Whatever she does she will do well because she has that angry Irish spirit. I think that’s important for a girl nowadays, to have a little bit of spirit. I think there is a lot of backlash coming, especially for women, almost an anti-feminist movement. It’s going the other way now. I think there is a real movement of young girls who are thinking that they’d rather be a homemaker, back to the 50s mentality, and comparing that to a career.

LR: What about having both, a family and a career?
TC: I think a lot of young people are thinking ‘no I’m not going to do the career, I might do it later on but I’m going to do the family thing now’. In the last 20 years I’ve seen the reverse, women who are 16 or 17 just driven for a career didn’t even contemplate anything else, let alone travel, children or relationships even. They just wanted that power. I think it comes back to power and that’s what’s lacking in a lot of poetry: there’s not a lot of power. I do believe that there is a lot of rubbish being published; stuff that doesn’t make people think. Almost like disposable poetry. You can read it, it does something initially and then there is no more affect.

LR: So what makes your poetry different then?
TC: I think there is a bit of a boot in mine. A bit of a punch. I know The Crooked Floor will upset some people, especially my father. It’s a very honest book. Normally in the past I’ve held back on things but this time I haven’t. Poetry should be honest. It’s the optimum word. A lot of it isn’t, though.
In a lot of cases, poetry, and I can say this about my own work, is lies. It’s like a biography that’s not a biography. Things have been changed, factored in to make it, but not necessarily better, or profound, but just to hide something.

LR: Are all the poems in The Crooked Floor little ‘memoirs’ or do some of them lean more towards fun and fiction?
TC: They’ve all started from something in my life. Something I’ve seen, something I’ve heard or experienced. A very important place to me was Point Danger, on the border between NSW and QLD. During the late 90s and early 2000 I spent a lot of time on that border – Point Danger – below the light house looking at the ocean. That was a very important place for creativity for me.

LR: Describe to me where you live and where you write. Does your place influence what you write?
TC: I don’t particularly like crowds. It’s a serious thing I have. A phobia of crowds. If I go to a cinema or church I’ll sit in the back. Even at a family event I will sit in the back because I have a fear of being locked in. Where I live is very [pause], lots of trees, lots of birds, a very quiet place. Just on the outskirts of Brisbane. For me, the optimum time to write is night-time. I go to bed at two or four in the morning. The down side is that I don’t get a lot of sleep.  Surroundings are definitely important. I have a desk in my bedroom upstairs. The place I’m living in now, almost all the poems for The Crooked Floor were written in that place.

LR: Do you think the poems would be different if you had written them somewhere else?
TC: Yes. Definitely. I have the belief that whoever has been in a particular house or flat before – the sounds, the smells, the structure – changes things. I think my place is a strong place. My two loves are writing and art. I have a lot of art on the walls, a lot of colour. I have a yellow floor.

LR: Do you have any favourite poets and poems?
TC: This is an important question to me. Les Murrey, Dylan Thomas… I’m not so much interested in American Poets. ‘Five Bells’ is my number one poem by Kenneth Slessor. It’s an extraordinary poem. One of the most beautiful pieces of literature. Second to that is ‘Cold Wires of Rain’ by Anthony Lawrence. And then ‘Fish of Joy, lap the waters of sight’ – that’s one of mine. It’s in The Ruined Room (my collection before The Crooked Floor). It’s about a blind woman I met. It’s probably the most important piece of writing I’ve ever done. It changed my whole viewpoint.

LR: How do you feel about your new collection, The Crooked Floor?
TC: Great cover and great selection. Just my ego playing its harmonics. I think it’s a good collection. My best work.

Lana is an intern at Ilura Press. She has recently had success with both her fiction and poetry, among others claiming first place in the Youth Poetry section of the My Brother Jack Literary Awards. To learn more about Tim Collins or purchase The Crooked Floor, please visit the Ilura Press website.

The Crooked Floor Launch: You are invited

Ilura Press is proud to invite you to the Brisbane launch of

The Crooked Floor by TM Collins

SUNDAY, 8 November 2009, 2-4pm
@ Redlands IndigiScapes Centre, Tallowwood Room
17 Sunnymede Road, Capalaba QLD

Join us in celebrating this honest and poignant collection of poetry by one of Australia’s most notable and award winning writers. A collection that transcends age and gender, T M Collins describes it as his “best work yet”.

To be launched by

Silvana Gardner (Poet and Visual Artist)
with Graham Nunn (Director, Qld Poetry Festival) as MC

For those in Brisbane at the time, come along to support a local writer for an afternoon of readings, book signings, nibblies and wine.

Everyone welcome!

To print your personal launch invite, please click here.

Feel free to just come along on the day, but if you would like to help us get an idea of numbers, please RSVP editors@ilurapress.com or call (03) 9529 2393.