Canberra: Recent Work, 2026, 78pp.

Andrew Moss’s Hybrid Heaven is, as its title suggests, conceived as a hymn to hybridity. Indeed, hybridity and its closely connected phenomenon, diaspora, seem to be the driving forces behind his work. There’s nothing especially contentious in this notion of hybridity being valuable, or, at least, nothing that needs defending since we descend from people who hybridised with Neanderthals (no dilution of “pure” genes there) and the language that Moss’s poems (and this review) is written in is a classic hybrid – a creole formed by the blending of Old English and Norman-French with a pile of Latin and Greek words added at the intellectually upper-end of the lexicon. Diaspora – Diaspora3 is the title of an earlier collection – is a slightly vaguer word having moved over the years from an original meaning of a culture dispersed (“through-scattered” is the meaning of the Greek original) into foreign parts but retaining a strong connection with its homeland, to a broader and less definite meaning that involves any sort of migration, refugee or economic. It’s tempting to think of that initial spread of modern humans out of Africa sixty or seventy thousand years ago as a foundational diaspora though it is likely to have been more of an economic migration than one driven by over-population or climate change. Diaspora and hybridity are what make us what we are and those who see cultural and ethnic change as a threat are usually people not aware that the state they live in is just a snapshot, taken at a moment in time, of a process marked by continuous change. One of the poems from Hybrid Heaven uses as its epigraph Levi-Strauss’s claim that “All cultures are the result of a mishmash” something that sums it up nicely.

At any rate, Moss’s loud championing of hybridity in this book is more concerned with his own immediate situation as the son of a Ghanaian mother and an English father, brought up in London and now living and working in Australia. All of his five books of poetry have appeared in the last three years. This might be the result of an intense recent writing phase but I suspect that many of the poems in them were written years ago and have only recently found sympathetic publishers. Having said that, there is, to my ear and mind at least, a clear increase in quality and the two most recent books, published by Recent Work Press, show him at his best. The poems collected in the earlier books tend to be in a kind of aggressive performance mode and reading them can be a bit like being trapped in a lift with someone wearing very bright clothes who is dancing and shouting at you at the same time. It’s probably a consciously chosen aesthetic, aiming at something like what one finds in some music videos but justified as being the correct mode for the hybridised cultural position Moss adopts. A couple of randomly chosen examples will probably show this better that my attempts at description. The first is from a poem called “North-West Diasporas” from Diaspora3:

. . . . . 
Saffa skateboarders roll bespoke bathtubs
enamelled and clawed feet flip flop in exposure
Bob along the cobbled streets of Lonsdale, muse
at Mursi and Maasai elongated ear lobes, listen
to stretched stories of Kiwis at the weekends
Comin’ in from the cold, tube fuselage
opening their beaks doing pelicans
Swallow and regurgitate vomit bombs . . .

And the second is from “Diaspora Space Travel” from Objections, Scars & Artefacts:

On cracked soil, the Akan sun beats its rays
We fashion and fly to Dogon constellations
Lake Bosomtwe basins to Jupiter’s craters
We jump the tilapia scaled rocket fish
Our mettle conducts L’Overture’s symphonies
Scored in high-life, grime and calypso rhythms . . .

Though the two passages do very different things – the first is part of a catalogue of examples of mixed ethnicities and the second an imaginary voyage through space – they share the same remorseless insistent beat. They work by overloading the reader with statements rather than by any of the subtler possibilities of poetry but they retain that status by always having an eye or ear out for verbal connections. And so in the second passage, the scales of the rocket fish suggest “metal” which produces “mettle” in the next line and the reference to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian uprising at the end of the eighteenth century produces the word “symphonies”.

Not all of Moss’s poems are in this expansive mode and there is a strain of a shorter, more minimal style spread throughout the books. A good example, and one worth looking at briefly, is another poem from Objections, Scars & Artefacts, “Tailor Made Images”, something of a “poem-poem”:

Metaphor my mistress, my seamstress
Simile my sibling, rivals in imagery, compare

stories so similar dress vanity fairs
Yet cut from a cloth of difference
The tailor hums with his machine mellifluous
Imaginative substitutions with stitches
Amidst the whirr and clank

into interwoven seamless tapestries
Tale coats made to measure, not off the rack
Woven and sewn into technicolour dreamcoats.

As we will see, the idea of tailoring is a recurrent metaphor, especially tailoring which brings together different cloths, metaphorically hybridising them. The results, as in the title, are both made by the tailor and tailor-made.

Hybrid Heaven begins with a long poem, however, which describes a visit to a Polish club in Canberra. Again, it pretty much isolates examples of cultural hybridity, the ground-bass here being Polish culture:

. . . . . 
Witamy chalks a crowded blackboard,
in a flourish of bubble calligraphy,
stuffed with pierogi,
dumplings & golabki cabbage rolls
for Jew & Gentile Pokies free socials
For Pole & non-Pole

Opposite, students wrap up in the loop
of Dr. Who scarves,
time travellers from a seventies TARDIS,
Eco warriors in hiking boots & Nepalese fleeces,
chunky translucent step sepia soles
Doc Marten loafers juxtapose
with the French Resistance . . .

It’s a generally benevolent mixing of cultures and the benevolence is reflected in the way the pressure of the poem is a lot less than in the earlier poems I quoted. You can see it also in “Canberra New & Old” – “Next Gen sauna buddies from Calabria / exchange Snowy Hydro scheme anecdotes / Macedonians, Greeks & Serbo-Croats . . .” – but the calmer, less surreal, less impacted tone of poems like this may simply derive from their being about Canberra, a slightly artificial, unrepresentative city. Goulburn, where Moss seems to have been a teacher before moving to Canberra, gets a distinctly harsher judgement:

. . . . . 
Strange orange fruit
in Guantanamo baying costumes
Super maxxed by red necked rusty screws
in correctional service uniform
Wolves in Merino clothing
In Surveillance Capital Country
an abattoir of artifice flexes indus-
trial muscle . . .

The symbol for the desired cultural hybridity that appears regularly in these poems is “kintsugi kente”. It first appears in a poem of that name at the end of Japanabandon. The kintsgugi element refers to that very Japanese way of repairing broken objects but emphasising the lines of repair by highlighting them in gold. The Kente element is another tailoring reference: it describes a Ghanaian weaving practice whereby strips of brightly coloured cloth are joined in a way that, as with kintsugi, highlights the difference in patterns rather than eliding them. All in all, it’s a fine symbol of acknowledged difference forming a working whole. The best example of its use in Hybrid Heaven is probably “Once Upon My Time” with its very Dylan Thomas title and opening:

Once upon my time, I write
myself, two exclusive histories
My story into one unity
One kintsugi kente tako-tsubo pot
of the broken, found & lost
The return to roots
comes to term with routes
Multiple, a youth sutures into story
like Cuffay & Daley tailoring, stitches
each wound, each bruise, each confusion
into a beautiful journey
Rainbow contusions
Paths of distinction, figuring
Every road a finger triggering

(The inclusion of William Cuffay in this poem refers to the mixed-race man, politically active in England at the end of the eighteenth century who was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania as a political criminal and, after being pardoned three years into his sentence, set up, significantly in these poems, as a tailor.)

Although, as I have said, the mode of much of Moss’s poetry doesn’t really appeal to me, it’s true that the two recent books are a little less loudly assertive, aiming at least for a modicum of suggestion. This probably says more about my tastes than it does about the quality of Moss’s poetry but it’s interesting that, a third of the way through the book, there should be a poem which I think is a little masterpiece. It’s called “Cotswold Stone Heart”:

Etched in my memory – Deddington
red sandstone gateway to the Cotswolds
Far from his Goulburn home

I think of Knowlman on tour
Turning his racing wheel
the other side of the world

rebuilding an edifice brick by brick
& I think, trapped in aspic nostalgia
Of my first mini trips, after earning my licence,

how sandstone turned into flint
at the forgetting of my eyelid
near Bristol borders, how Bilbury yellow

turned autumnal at Netherswell Manor
Stowed on the wold, swotting for A levels
Perplexed by untamed shrews

who eschewed my advances, swatting me
like one of Donne’s metaphysical fleas

(as with William Cuffay, the reference to Knowlman is to a migrant who, leaving England in search of a healthier climate, set up a store and stately home in Goulburn and became mayor.)

“Cotswold Stone Heart” is about transition, the author’s transition to adulthood and the transition, beginning at Deddington, to the upmarket luxuries of the Cotswolds. Symbolic of this change is the change in the quality of the stones used in construction of the old houses. It has Moss’s usual technique of punning to suggest the next line of the poem – so here, while he is swotting for his exams, the targets of his lust (also the stone hearts of the title) swat him aside – but, more importantly it has a beautiful and convincing poetic shape that the other poems often lack. It’s a shape that could be categorised as a move from a fairly high, formal subject and style to a wry, personal conclusion. That’s a shape I seem especially sensitive to and other reviews will have referred to Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”, Dransfield’s “Epiderm” and, above all, to Catullus XI which begins with a grand invocation of all the places the poet’s career might be going to take him – “furthest India / Where the shore is pounded by far-resounding / Eoan rollers // To Hyrcania or effeminate Arabia, / The Sacians or the arrow-bearing Parthians . . .” – and spirals down to a lament for his love for serially unfaithful Lesbia which is “like a flower / On the meadow’s margin after a passing / Ploughshare has touched it”. Perhaps I’ve simply absorbed this particular structure and respond strongly whenever I see anything that has a parallel shape, but I would want to make the case that it’s an especially satisfying shape. For a start, it embodies, as strongly climactic conclusions (gong-tormented seas and the two nothings) don’t, the fragile, throwaway quality that is a crucial part of the lyric tradition.

Unlike “Cotswold Stone Heart”, most of the poems of this book deal with hybridity, and Moss’s intense advocacy raises the question about the balance between poetry and commitment. Our current sensitivities to ethnicity, colonialisation etc encourage each person to believe that he or she is uniquely positioned in a kind of war and must express this position. This results in something like the “witness” approach to poetry. The radically alternative position says something like: “If you are a real poet, you will know that there are things you can write and things you need to write. Just write them: they may be about the sun and the moon, a woman you saw on the bus, or the ideas of Wittgenstein. All the distinctiveness of your personal situation will appear unconsciously, inflecting what you write”. When the first of these two approaches is criticised, it is often that it requires you to look at yourself from the outside. Although this may be revealing – “I never realised I was discriminated against until I read the work of x” – it will also, inevitably, be reductive. This is the background to Frank O’Hara’s whimsical “personism manifesto” with its memorable “If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” In other words, write – or, in this case, run – don’t treat your situation as an abstraction.

It’s also the issue raised in the first of Seamus Heaney’s lectures delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Heaney had good reason to be tempted to make his situation into the base of his poetry. His issue wasn’t a hybrid background, it was more extreme: he was a Catholic brought up in rigidly Protestant Northern Ireland and reached adulthood during “the troubles”. A friend was murdered by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. As such, he was constantly being asked to foreground his position more in his poetry, to become more of a spokesman. In his lecture he shows how this should be resisted:

And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a late-twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and “silence-breaking” writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.

Having a double, hybridised self may not compare to being a Catholic young man during the troubles but a poem like “Cotswold Stone Heart” shows a subtler way of dealing with the self’s distinctive situation than the aggressive, semi-surreal stance of those earlier poems. It’s a true poem, at least by Heaney’s standards, and that’s saying something.