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

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.