Santa[sic] Lucia: Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, 2026, 86pp.
Liam Ferney’s rather marvellous new book is very much an extension of his previous work to the extent that it turns out that most of the things I want to say about it, I find I have already said in earlier reviews. But, to summarise, at the risk of repetition, these are poems drenched in popular culture, in its bizarre fracturings of language, its coded quality which, like all jargons, works to simultaneously include and exclude. And the hipsterish, throwaway, almost contemptuous tone of the poems themselves seems to come from this world. The fundamental question, which I think I was forced to ask in previous reviews, is what is the poet’s attitude to all this: is it contemptuous of the world that forms the ground of the poems, or is it, to an extent, indulgent as though the world of skateboarding or weight-lifting or nineteen-nineties films is something you can briefly inhabit as part of a smorgasbord of options? Is contemporary popular culture no more than a dazzling set of distractions for people, the poet included, living with personal griefs or, more significantly, for a world rapidly heading towards an apocalyptic meltdown? One result of the density of popular culture codes is that you have to read some of the poems with Google at the ready – I discovered, for example, that betamale is not a prescription medicine or a Mexican delicacy – but then there is something satisfying about the way in which the digital world, having encouraged these gnomic sub-cultural contractions, provides the machine with which we can translate them. I should also apologise in advance for doing more quoting in this review than I usually do: it’s just that kind of book.
Shark of Messina begins with an example of the keynote sensitivity to the way time is progressing and things are getting worse or, rather, getting worse at an accelerating rate. “The Roaring Twenties” of the title is, of course, the twenties we are living in, not those of last century. It begins, “You don’t get the kind of war you deserve / you get the kind you get” – a marker of individual helplessness where disaster, far from being amenable to our desires, doesn’t even conform to a shape that might be poetic justice for us. In other words, you as an individual have absolutely no relevance to the various cataclysms which are coming. The poem then goes on to be a delicious development (I should probably say “riff” but it’s a word I’m reluctant to use) of the idea that the carnival – or, in Brisbane’s case, the Ekka – is over:
. . . . . Don’t fret. We thought of everything. We packed lions for the evacuation centre. Astonished clowns gurn for a feed. Thank the circus for stumping up for juice after the transformer’s fire fritz. Bless the carny with hot chips and dagwood dogs for days enough to last this arc of a prequel to apocalypse, say toodle-pip to glum teens and good morrow to the roaring twenties.
To stay with this theme of incipient apocalypse, there are a number of poems that could be looked at. “Guard Duty 2091” is one portrait of the future which eschews natural catastrophes caused by human stupidity in favour of a world ending with an ugly whimper. It imagines a guard seventy or seventy-five years after the writing of the poem getting his instructions: “Don’t open the door. For anyone. / Take this. Use it if anyone opens it. / I will not be back.” And it finishes with some final advice:
. . . . . Tie knots, smith things. Cash the preparations you made. The boots were well worth the investment, if not for the shadowrat you took them off. Some grifters will flourish in a new golden age of grimy, desperate faith.
There is something of this idea that grottiness only increases in end times in “No New Thing Under the Sun”:
Praise ancestors for the fountains
That the descendants pissed with.
The sky is much quieter now
The wisdom of the planes
Comes more infrequently.
There isn’t much to say,
The Sorrow is still to come.
. . . . .
the new phone knows
More apps, updates
Infrequently, the Grief on delay.
A number of the poems deal with local fire and flood events, all of which seem to be harbingers of the greater and more frequent disasters of the future. And these poems, like many, like to offer advice about how to deal with this. And usually that is upbeat, despite the situation: something along the lines of “cling to and appreciate what you’ve got”. “34 Weeks” is about retrieving things damaged by a flood event:
. . . . . Time passed gilds the gone and it’s tough to grieve when you struggle to inventory the lost. But amidst the missing I found this, in my Sunday shed remembering Toots Hibbert by letting Lenny Henzell highlight the finest shades of after shower sunshine. That’s something, I suppose. When the tide goes out what does the water leave behind.
Toots Hibbert and Lenny Henzell might have needed some looking up, but perhaps the best poem to exemplify the interaction of popular culture – with all these arcane references – and a world going down the tube is “Welcome to Hell”. Here the setting is the Covid epidemic, yet another harbinger of doom. I’ll quote the poem in full:
It’s funny how we can let some things slide. I’ve dialled back my podcast diet for the pandemic but keep nexting skate parts of YouTube. Gonz ripping the short bank by the Ralphs, gapping the Wallenberg Set. Checked out Trasher’s My War yet? Sammy Baca nose slide shuv-it out down a snakey rail. For tha little homies. Nuge leans a large arc on Baker 7 as Baca rolls away on his 27th trip. Don’t judge me. You didn’t write Macbeth & I’m banged up Chad Muska on the sidelines while Jamie Thomas redefines grinds.
The third last line comes at exactly the right (ie poetically right) time here, at just the point where a reader would wonder why they are being subjected to this jargon-riddled nonsense. But the deeper issue the poem wants to explore is the way superficial things can become weirdly significant in times of crisis. In “License to Drive”, which begins – “The good news about the end of days is / you’ve got something to write about. / The bad news is.” – the advice for living through these times is to immerse yourself in some random item of popular culture, here it’s “Go full 80s: floppy discs, / metal hair and Corey Heim . . .”
It’s no surprise that in a book of poems about a world where popular culture co-exists with a powerful sense of an impending ending, the issue of poetry itself should be important. The bleakest view of the whole process probably comes from the significantly titled “Mountebank” which concludes: “Thing is I wasted time writing this / and you wasted time reading it”. But other poems have a more nuanced approach to the whole business. “A Defence of Poetry” has a “stressed Arts smart” ask: “in / destitute times what are poems for” and the body of the poem provides a fairly bleak answer: poetry is something a poet is stuck with even if “you’re clumsy and rip / what you sew”. Poetry doesn’t “resound / with the aorta’s pound” with “a fraction / of the finesse of any halfway / competent self-funded fright flick”. Depressing as this answer is, like “Welcome to Hell”, the poem wants to leave with at least a flicker of hope in that “after the rains the sun will shine” – “not quite a lie” and significantly a quotation from a popular film.
There is also an impatience with what is conceived as soft-centred lyric poetry which, focussing on trees, skies, silences and the spaces between words and such, doesn’t mesh with the state of the contemporary world. It’s done in terms of two Koreans in “Poetry”: first there is Kim Yong Taik who “says there is nothing as exciting / as a white page” but this is roundly rejected: “who has time for paper / in our accelerated century”. This isn’t the right model for Ferney:
. . . . . Mr Kim poets about snow so maybe he likes white but I can’t say I’m not more of a Park Sang Tae type fronting wisecracks and faux wisdom. Not available to stream but you can torrent if you have VPN.
“To Self” focusses on what seems like an actual poetic rejection:
. . . . .
these tercets tempered
by a tenured top dog’s testers
like a recycler’s heel squashing a schweppes
your metaphor of the owen stanley range
as the verde rash of a fuzzy white
caterpillar of condensation
gets you shot out of the cannon . . .
Finally, there is a comparatively modest celebration of poetry but it is located in another poet’s work in “Chapeau”. Ferney describes his poems, accurately, as “stitched from the threads of a millennium / ended and the new one just begun”. My reading of the last part of the poem – which works with the idea that you can judge the value of your poems by a quick look at “the relevant combatif’s palmarès”, ie a list of poetry prize winners – is inhibited a bit by the acronym GVA. Google lists a bewildering set of possibilities and the poem doesn’t so much as hold up Corey Wakeling’s The Alarming Conservatory for comparison and admiration so much as criticise one of a prize judge’s “shambling account” of it:
. . . . .
But even this becomes the raw prawn,
i.e. which one of GVA’s maillot jaunes
sparked enthusiasm enough to tap out
a shambling account of the good time to be had
in Corey’s alarming conservatory?
Many of these poems finish with a wry recommendation to live in the present, such as it is and the move towards something positive is very much a part of the poems’ poetic structure: yes, they seem to say, this is bathetic but consider the alternative. The ironically titled “Lullaby” is a poem which lays out the damaging effects of the algorithm where “the Kings and Queens of Clickbait / are sovereign” and provide material “for after darks”. As we all know this is a structure which foments and encourages division and the second stanza makes a connection with the long established religion of the West and its notion that there is a force for evil intent on damaging “the blue dot”. This quasi-manichean view means that division is inbuilt in a society and that the algorithm offers us the opportunity with a method “to cudgel one another / into obliteration”. There isn’t anything especially new in Ferney’s comments about this corner of contemporary problems but the end of the poem – “Sleep sweet in a safe mortgage, / there is always still something to hunger for” – is a surprise in that it’s hard to guess at the exact degree of contempt that is present. At any rate, it is one of these conclusions which are common in the book and stress the value, pathetic as it is in comparison with the horrors that are coming, of living with the limited version of reality which the present moment gives you. Considering a past love in “Skinny Love”, we are told about the dangers of living in memories of the past. In the language of the poem it is mined ground: we might think it is safe – the “deminers are demobbed” – but it’s full of tripwires still and Ferney’s advice to himself is “tamp the tempt let things lie as they lie”.
The best statement of this approach to things can be found in two poems. “A Wretched World Full of Beauty” celebrates, in a reasonably down-beat way, the options of an afternoon when “the muses don’t deal” which include watching a pre-game football show or listening to Schubert, both ends of a scale of “low” to “high” culture. The last line merely says, “That’s just life at present”. The second poem is the book’s last and also its title poem. I read it as being about Trump’s America where the sort of behaviour we associate with Sicilian gangs becomes the method of US politics: “This was the decade we learnt / how mobs work”. The final advice – actually the final advice of the whole book – is a version of “cling to what you have” but the reference to an Italian cyclist’s famously hair-raising descent during a race means that this isn’t imagined to be a lazy or slovenly option. It should be something far more exhilarating:
. . . . . The simplest precept: keep the things that bring you joy. Come back to them, living, like Nibali on the Poggio, again and again and again.
