Tag Archives: Jean Kent

Izzy Roberts-Orr: Raw Salt; Jean Kent, Martin Kent: Paris Light; Nathanael O’Reilly: Dublin Wandering

Posted on by Martin Duwell

Raw Salt (np: Vagabond Press, 2024, 94pp.)
Paris Light (World Square, NSW: Pitt St Poetry, 2024, 93pp.)
Dublin Wandering (Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2024, 59pp.)

A first book, Raw Salt has a unifying subject: grief; in this case grief for the loss of the poet’s father. But it is notable for locating this subject in an interestingly varied set of modes so that readers never get the sense of a topic or obsession being mined for every last gram of poetry that could possibly be extracted. The result is a book which, if anything, stresses its author’s creativity and inventiveness. Despite the individual characters of the poems, however, there are settings, themes and symbols which recur, providing a nice structural cross-bracing . We meet one immediately in the first poem, “Imbibed Aubade”, which begins with an extended metaphor identifying the author with a possum sussing out the possibilities of dawn, before introducing the idea of a “wind phone”, something that gives its name to the first section of the book:

. . . . . 
In Otsuchi, there is a phone booth
where you can dial the dead.
Kaze no denwa, the wind phone
carries your words on the currents
but air is not the same thing as breath.
On the corner of Stranger Street
I hurry into the booth, furtive
though there is no one else in need
of a pay phone at this hour – or maybe
ever, in Brunswick. . .

This first section is about contact, or the lack of it, or the necessary inadequacy of the attempts when it comes to contact between the living and the dead. In “At This Hour” a tapping at the window seems like the dead father attempting to make contact – “Doesn’t he know / that the tap on the window / is reserved for lovers?” – and the final poem of this first group imagines the ghost of the father as a kind of digital phenomenon – “Your ghost hangs out in the phone lines”.

While the first section largely revolves around the idea of communication, the second, “Body of Water”, takes as a unifying idea the fact that memories of life as a child with the father are located at the beach. The ocean is conceived as something everpresent no matter what the poet’s situation – “The sea is coming for me too / slinking under the sound of traffic / circling the curb”. Two of the poems recount powerful memories of life with the father at the beach. In “Shifted” the emphasis is on the treacherous way in which sand moves and landcapes change:

. . . . . 
          And yet – the lagoon I’d spent so long
conjuring in the corner of memory was gone.
You thought I was mixing my coastlines. Now,
I know the map moves underfoot. My six year
old self shifts on the hip of my thirty year old 
self, points at the horizon where the inlet mouths
a greeting, a warning, a silent bell I can hear.

And “Phosphorescence, You Said” recounts being “dragged out of sleep in the / heavy net of your arms” to see the sea in one of its phosphorescent phases, paralleling the stars above. The image in “Shifted” of the poet carrying her younger self on her hip is one which recurs throughout the book: not always in exactly the same form but always one which acknowledges that any self carries with them all their previous selves. It’s an example of the one of the repeated elements that make the book the varied unity that it is. As the first poem of the third section says, “Walking the beach hand in hand with a long line / of my former selves”.

This third section is generally concerned with inner spaces, both in the sense of within the self and its memories and within actual rooms – “I walk through empty rooms, touching everything / you have touched”. I think the best of them is “Boots Shack” because the memories inside the building are tactile and even, for the poet, totemic:

. . . . . 
                              We’ll sit by the fire and wait.

For you to deafen us with rock, stir gravy stock, make
spanakopita or spaghetti with tomato sauce and tasty cheese?

For you to flick tea towels, chase werewolves, dance like a too-tall
Mick Jagger, buy chocolate you think we don’t like just so we don’t

eat it – then realise you don’t like it either. For you to say our names
like you’re telling us off and telling us to stay close at the same time?

Crush my lungs with a hug, fix stubbed toes with a squeeze, shake the roof
with your snore and show us what the strongest muscle in our bodies is for?

Is home where you’re going, or where you’ve been?

That stubbed toe is one of the repeated images of the book and one that stays with the reader. There’s enough accomplished variety in Raw Salt to remind us that this is a book of poems rather than a project to explore an overwhelming emotion. What will happen in the future is up to the poet of course. One would like her to go on being a poet even though the overpowering impulse behind future poems may not be present any longer. In a sense, the final section of the book, “Still Life”, is an indication of what it might look like since this section seems like a more decentred collection of poems: a conventional poetry book in miniature. Yes, the father’s loss is present in the first poem, “Missing”, but the other poems deal with a variety of different themes. The pun of its title, implying “yes, I’m still living despite depression and grief”, is a clue to the tone of these poems but, as I have said, there’s enough variety to leave one sanguine about the poems that will make up this poet’s next books.

And so, briefly, to two books of poetry about two capital cities. Two very different books but ones that it’s hard to resist looking at together. Jean Kent’s Paris Light: A Personal Plan de Paris (it includes art by her husband, Martin) is something of a culmination of a major strand in her work, her experiences in that august European capital. Nathanael O’Reilly’s Dublin Wandering takes random words from Joyce’s Ulysses, working through the book backwards to produce eighteen surreal (or Oulipean) poems matching the chapters of the original (though, of course, in reverse order). It might be argued that this is a set of poems about a book but since Ulysses is so completely about Dublin, this turns out to be a set of poems which is, in its own way, about Dublin.

We have met Jean Kent’s love affair with Paris in Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks and in The Shadow Box, a letter-based recreation of her grandparents’ relationship during the First World War in the course of which her grandmother moved temporarily to Paris. This grandmother reappears in Paris Light in the poem, “Rue St-Lazare”, where the poet follows her footsteps after she arrived on the train from Marseilles. Without wanting to make to much of this, it is a kind or re-writing poem since the arrival was covered in one of the poems from The Shadow Box. In fact, there’s a good deal of poetic structuring going on in this book. It’s not enough to invoke Oulipo or surrealism, as Dublin Wandering will do, but it’s there nevertheless and the care in the construction means that one’s first reading of the title as implying “Paris Lite” – ie a whimsical and perhaps slightly indulgent revisiting of the source of many earlier poems – mightn’t be entirely accurate. There are twenty-six poems, most dealing with a single street, and they are arranged in alphabetical order from “Rue de l’Ave-Maria” to “Rue Zoologique” (an admittedly imaginary Rue). In many of them, the operating initial letter is allowed to percolate through the text so that in the first poem we meet a passage like

. . . . . 
I pass through this ancient aperture
into photographs by Atget – architecture
with (almost) all of its soot
rinsed off,

advertisements for another age ghosting . . .

Many of these streets are close to the Cite Internationale des Arts where poet and artist/partner boarded for two six monthly spells. One of the pleasures of reading the book is to have Google Maps alongside and follow both the maps and their accompanying photos. It’s a nice introduction to a great and beautiful city, fulfilling, in a small way, what the recent Olympics did.

In the poems themselves, however, there’s a much more complex portrait of Paris. “Rue de Figuer” contrasts the medieval, constructed sense of the city with actual, wild living things like fruit-bearing trees:

In the centre of Paris, is this possible? A green privacy of leaves,
real figs fattening . . .  Between the fantasy turrets, mazed tulips,
clochard sun-sleeping at Hotel de Sens and the Clinic for STDs,
spring swells these ornaments on the squat, footpath trees. . .

The homeless – the sans abri – seem always present and there’s an interesting passage in “Rue des Barres” where blossoming environmental beauty is placed alongside beggary:

. . . . . 
This is where the neighbourhood comes to see
the first spring-flowering tree. A delicate snowfall
of crabapple; dusty pink, pure white. Crocuses,
shy in the grass nearby – and a Japanese couple,
aaah-ing with camera lenses, while a French woman,
ageing but ecstatic in purple, exults to me:
“C’est la première . . . la première du printemps!”

Back at the church, spring will bring the first
dedicated beggar. She appears out of the darkness
of St Gervais-St Protais, a mass of solidifying folds. . .

As another poem, “Passage d’Enfer”, says, “Every city, every life, has its hells. / Holes in the day you fall down . . .” and “Rue de Turbigo” is a dispassionately observed location where

. . . . . 
The staircase from here to there
was barricaded by homeless men’s mattresses

and though I braved the stench
of their open-air toilet between two beds,
when I came up for air again, 
I was still a blind swimmer, with no current home. . .

There’s a lot of walking in Paris Light and it forms another, tenuous connection with Nathanael O’Reilly’s Dublin Wandering. The tradition – it’s being going long enough to be referred to in that way – of building poems or novels out of existing texts comes with a set of problems for both critics and literary historians. As a reader it’s often hard to have any response to the resulting texts apart from an admiration for the ingenuity of the process, mechanical or otherwise, which has produced them: I’m reminded of an early response to Mahler’s music – “Ironic music only ever elicits ironic applause”. An awful lot depends on whether the reader knows what devices have been applied to the text. If you’re lucky, a note in the text somewhere will tell you. More likely a review will be written by a friend who is au fait with the processes which is fine but leaves other readers far behind. The result is a tendency to respond not to the texts themselves but to the model which has produced them. And then there are the purposes that underlie the generative procedures. These can range from the aggressive French-rationalist desire to destroy the waffly, faintly spiritual notion of creativity and show that texts can come from mechanical or aleatory procedures to the very opposite: the belief that in some way this can tap into the barely understood territories of the unconscious. It was a conflict played out in the early days of surrealism and, unfortunately, has meant that the term can almost opposed meanings. I mention this because the word is used in the “Note on the Source and Methods” that comes at the end of Dublin Wandering where its author describes the book as “a surrealist work inspired by modernist techniques and philosophies, created as a homage to Joyce’s masterpiece”. There’s also an inevitable ambiguity in the description of the process when it speaks of how “the words and phrases used in the poems were randomly selected while turning the pages of the novel in reverse order, one page at a time . . .” “Randomly” and “selected” have an oxymoronic sense, though it’s hard to think of something to replace “selected”, a word which always connotes “deliberately chosen”. Perhaps “randomly appropriated” might have been better.

Even at this stage, I’m guilty of saying more about the implications of the process than about the eighteen poems themselves. As I’ve said, it’s an endemic problem for reviewers of texts like these. My only real comment is to register a surprise as to how much Dublin there is in this book. Is that a result of careful and canny selection or is Joyce’s work so impregnated with Dublin that any selection of words from it is likely to still taste of that city? The only way forward here is to conduct the obvious experiment of producing one’s own text so, starting at the end of the novel’s first section, I used the same technique. One of the results of this is the realisation of how few words are actually chosen. At any rate, it’s not difficult to produce a very “un-Dublinish” text. I’ll spare readers my fifty-three line poem but it began, “A voice plunged in alarm / and nodded towards the void . . .” O’Reilly’s “Telemachus” begins rather more interestingly:

curve turning waved hand

seal’s sleek brown head

on the water usurper cannot go home

throw twopence here for a pint

history is to blame an Irishman

calmly think free yourself behold

grim displeasure free thought . . .

and so on. The other result is the realisation that there is probably little that is aleatory in the process. This, you realise, is a deliberate reflection of Joyce’s book, a genuine homage, making something odd but derived from the text. I initially assumed that the reason the selection process worked backwards, beginning with the end of Ulysses, was so that the resulting text couldn’t be conceived as one of the infinite possible compressions of its original. I wonder now whether it might not have been inspired by the notion of paying homage by reflecting it – and on it – in an inverted image.

Jean Kent: Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks

Posted on by Martin Duwell

Sydney: Pitt St Poetry, 2012, 86pp.

Jean Kent’s Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks is an immensely likable collection, so likable that readers may miss some of its sophistication, thinking it no more than a set of poems about travels in France and Lithuania. It is actually a good deal more than that. Travel poetry, once it gets beyond the basic level of “I’ve written a poem about my trip to the Grand Canyon”, is usually about the self and the way in which aspects of the self, surprising even to the poet, are revealed when that self is faced by an experience of the alien. It is fine to have poems which come from a continual renewing of contact with some personal sacred ground but the self only develops (or “only reveals itself” – depending on your ideology) by moving into the unfamiliar. Even a poetry resolutely opposed to being based on a lyrically conceived self learns about (and expresses) the observing self when faced with an experience of the foreign: see, as an example, Laurie Duggan’s sequence, “Onati Notebook” from his The Pursuit of Happiness, reviewed on this site in May.

For the Jean Kent of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks , travel is a linguistic experience as much as anything else and the poems harbour a lot of a poet’s deliberately bad cross-language puns: pain/pain, les Loups/loops, “Aah oui”/”Are we”, rues/ruse and many more. It is also, as its title suggests, an experience of linguistic dislocation. But linguistic dislocation isn’t simply a matter of being in a country and not speaking the language, what we might call the abrasion of travel at a domestic level. There are, for a start, more languages than spoken languages: the languages of the senses, of bodily movement, even the weird syntax of foreign customs – both informal and those formalised in laws and institutions. And, to complicate matters, just as a famous episode of Dr Who contains the observation that “A door, once opened, may be crossed in either direction” so travellers, instead of being passive victims of linguistic confusion, bring their own languages with them to disorient the natives. You get some sense of the complexities involved here in the book’s opening, a triptych called “’Le Weekend’ in Paris”, the first poem of which begins:

Sundays in Paris unsettle us with silence.
The grumble of traffic stays dream-distant,
an argument with air in a language
we apprehend with our senses, its light fur
the only foreignness against our skins
when we wake. With the curtains closed
we could be anywhere.
Doodling dialogues of slow shoes
under our windows; in the distance, bells. . . .

Significantly the title of this poem is a “borrowing” from English, much objected to by purists, and the fourth word of the poem, and thus of the book, is “unsettle” that odd word that simultaneously describes translocation and merely jangled nerves. The vision of Paris in the final poem of this group of three, “The Language of Light”, is one not of unsettling linguistic foreignness but of a city partly transformed by its visitors. And these visitors are traced back to grandparents who, as soldiers, passed through Paris in the First World War. Sitting on park chairs (significantly the poem says “we settle briefly / on these wrought-iron chairs”), Kent describes an experience whereby all visitors across languages and across times harmonise with the language of Paris itself:

. . . . . 
Poles and Italians, Australians and Africans,
small boys and motorised boats all blend into a buzz
swarming from under the acid-yellow horse-chestnut leaves
. . . . .
                                                  The light,
as it negotiates peace settlements
within this temporary country
of cold shoulders,
is speaking everyone’s ancestral tongue.

But if dislocation seems the immediate, primary experience of the poems of this book, the search for the sort of harmonies spoken of here is what gives them both drive and shape. It is no surprise, then, that the figure of Rilke (a great poet of harmonising) looms large and “Following Rilke to the Paris Zoo”, also a sequence of three poems, is probably the core of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks. These are poems structured by a process which encourages the inclusion of the most disparate material and then shows that this can be harmonised into an aesthetic whole. I don’t want to bore readers but it is hard to explain how this works without looking briefly at the structures of the poems themselves.

“The Path of the Panther” begins with an epigraph from Rilke’s poem, setting up the expectation that the poem itself will begin with an expedition to the Jardin des Plantes. So the first pleasant dissonant shock is that it begins with the Penguin Book of German Verse, read in another country and in another time (this opening chimes with my own experience since I used this book as a school text myself, a few years before Jean Kent, and I too have kept my copy):

The margins of my Penguin Book of German Verse
are shadowy with beasts. There was no panther
in that schoolgirl text – I found him later, alone -
but still around each captured poem, voices snarl.
“Over all the hilltops,” Goethe promised “Ruh” -
. . . . .

The second dissonance allowed into the poem is the endless, mechanical annotations demanded of students and embarrassing to read forty years later. Metaphorically they are like the bars on the panther’s cage, although the teacher, whom we meet at greater length in other poems, “rose like a flamingo / from our flock of galahs”, dealing with Rilke’s “Liebes Lied” with its statement that everything that touches us (“alles, was uns anruehrt”) is material from which a single harmonious note can be drawn. The poem then goes on to deal not only with our inability to erase the past but with the way in which the past writes on us. The cover is:

a calligraphy as hypnotic and alien as the so-fashionable
white lace pantyhose I wore then. They disfigured my legs,
my mother said with shudders of distaste. They reminded her
of the ritual scarrings of primitive tribes. And why
would a young Queensland girl want to look like that?

No likelihood of that now, as middle-age inscribes
my thighs, slowing me into a macrame of veins no mini-skirt
could hope to happily skim. I have been written over 
as much as this book . . .
. . . . . 
I can only will the spaces of my world to widen
as I settle for such chaos, the bars of my bones growing shadow-light
round their own zoo of wild and gentle beasts.

All told, I think this is a rather wonderful poem. It also links up with other Australian poems. It has, for example, a touch of Gwen Harwood’s “Midwinter” about it in that it deals with a text from the past which turns up to speak to us in a future which that past could not have predicted. And, like the other poems in this sequence, there is a touch of the structure of Jennifer Maiden’s longer poems where the onward drive pulls more and more disparate items into the field of the poem, only to transform them into a surprising whole. And, at the end, it even recall’s Beaver’s image of his tortured self as a zoo in Letters to Live Poets. In “The Path of the Panther” the “whole” of the poem is summarised in the wish to entertain and finally harmonise the most widely disparate elements both in the outside world, in the world of the poem and in the inner world, her own internal zoo. The poem says you have to “settle for such chaos” but you also have to settle such chaos.

In the third poem of this group, “In the Jardin des Plantes”, we actually get to the home of Rilke’s panther. I presume, though I can’t be confident, that the roundabout path to the place itself in the three poems is yet another dissonance requiring to be absorbed and harmonised. It reminds me of the principle of the labyrinth whereby the harder our logical, meaning-seeking brains try to get us to the centre – in the labyrinth of reading and writing it becomes the central significance – the more we are thrown towards the outside. At any rate this poem makes a feature of its accretive structure. Once again the disparate worlds brought into the jardin involve youth, school and German lessons. When the poet is in the garden she sees children shouting “Les Loups! Les Loups!” when they see the models of wolves circling the hill. And this visual pun, of “looping”, is the primary motif of the poem. Memory “loops” over her and she recalls reading Anna Karenina under the desk at school. A Russian novel recalls Russian wolves and school recalls the pop group of the time, The Animals. The German teacher, the flamingo among galahs of the earlier poem, reappears. A victim of invasion, imprisonment and expulsion in the war – ultimate experiences of dislocation – she “encircles us / with futures doomed to rot”:

. . . . . 
A quarter of a century later, still I feel the sting
of her voice after she stops. Vibrated between
raw throated flowers and silvery circlings of wolves
. . . 
I almost forgive her for her love of sidling round us, hackling
our bare young necks between pigtails
with promises of suffering.

“O susses Lied! O sweet song!” Equivocal as history,
under Rilke’s bow her disparate voices chime.
. . . . .

Another sequence introduces, if not chaos then at least disjunctiveness, by being built around postcards from sunny Australia, sent by family and friends as if these “have suddenly become tourists in their own foreign land” reflected arches of the Pont Neuf or of Margaret Preston with Utrillo is often a motif drawn from the postcard. So a friend’s comment on seeing a black snake at home in Queensland echoes as an image for a snakelike queue for visas. In “Crocodiles in the Marais”, a card from Lake Macquarie with a picture of a crocodile moves the poem onto memories of the scaly skin of the Monstera Deliciosa which allegorises out into a statement about the frustrations of both living and reading with experiences that reveal themselves only at their own pace – like the slowly progressing, sweet semi-rotting of the Monstera fruit:

                                                       So much sweetness
in each fruit-salad phrase, no wonder we longed for our tongues
to be treated to whole poems, instantly. The monster, though,
was wiser. After the first ravishing: threats of razor blades.
When the skin resists, we learned, let it rest . . .

Now, in much longed-for Paris at an age when she should have a tough enough skin to be resistant to any stripping she finds herself ill with shingles, resulting in an intense surface pain in her neck. Confined to bed (“I imitate Proust”) she has a sense that the city has peeled her.

Though most of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks is built around a stay in Paris – something that might be a strain for any readers who are mildly Francophobic – there is one section, the second, devoted to a visit to in-laws (“the family my father-in-law left fifty years ago”) in Lithuania. In these poems we meet the same linguistic sensitivity:

Ruta’s favourite word is “maybe”.
The dictionary on her lap
is heavy as another passenger
as she strokes and cossets it, dropping
the juicy apple crystals of Lithuanian
and hauling back the slow
chewing gum of English. . . .

but the historical realities of the country as it emerges from the Soviet Bloc, the traumatic translocations of the poet’s husband’s parents, the sinister remains of a past that is not spoken about, all mean that these poems are more straightforwardly built on content rather than the challenges of a harmonising form such as we meet in the Paris poems.

This excellent book is the first I have read from the publisher, Pitt Street Poetry, so it is an opportunity to say what a physical pleasure (as well – as will be obvious from what I have written – as an intellectual one) it was to read. The physical component of the pleasure derives from good typography on beautiful, cream paper. Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks does have some awkward page breaks but this isn’t a problem with the other two books – by John Foulcher and Luke Davies – that I have from the same publisher. Though screened titles for the poems themselves may not be to every poetry reader’s taste – they suggest graphic design rather than book design – these three small books set a standard in Australian poetry publishing.