Article
Editorial: December 2009
November 19, 2009
Through a technique of repetition with tiny variations, Ireland’s Pat Boran yokes “Rabbits, swans, deer, butterflies . . .” into a litany whose coherency and unity has been forged through a memory replayed and replayed. I love Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s effortless interweaving of images, in ‘Ark’, of a “lonely locked room” and the nearby ocean, resulting in wonderful couplets such as: “Three knocks on the door reverberate in my heart / The tide leaps onto the sandy shore like a great host of turtles”.
Attempting to draw connections between seemingly unrelated phrases and images doesn’t necessarily mean the poet is trying to impose order and narrative on his or her perceptions and experience: often what is represented through these disparate associations is disorder, disunity. For example, the fragmented imagery and incongruent juxtapositions in Iranian poet Ali Abdolrezaei’s politically charged poems, published here along with audio recordings, result in texts as unstable as the subjectivities and violent landscapes they represent. Similarly, Australian Claire Potter challenges conventional modes of meaning-making in her use of ruptured syntax and ellipsis to both unite and detach sentence fragments such as “dancing in frieze”, “facing winter” and “tempting monogamy” in ‘The Appeal of Cranes’.
I imagine that each reader of this issue of PIW will notice different correlations and leitmotifs between the varied writers and their poems, just as each will see different patterns and common threads running through the personal and global events of the past ten years. As the Noughties draw to a close, enjoy navigating our final offerings of the decade.
By coincidence, in the twelfth month of the year, approaching the time of the twelve days of Christmas, we are publishing twelve poets. Just as I realised this, I happened to glance up at a postcard above my desk, sent from a friend while visiting New York City. On it is a haiku by Martin Burke: “On the twelfth floor / A life’s work holds open / The book reviewer’s door”. I’m not superstitious, and I didn’t see this sudden chance convergence of twelves as an end-of-the-decade omen, but it was still something to be appreciated for a moment – if only as a small reminder of the human mind’s delight and reassurance in finding and forging connections and patterns in the chaotic world around us.
Poets in particular, through their craft of metaphor and association, are able to discover connections and express artistic and emotional links between even very disparate ideas and events, using the poem itself as connective tissue between seemingly unrelated elements. For example, Mongane Wally Serote’s beautiful ‘Child of the Song’ loosely stitches together howling dogs, Nina Simone and “blood splashing on the flower petals in the garden” into a powerful plea not to give up fighting against tragedy and injustice. By the end of Afrikaans poet Lucas Malan’s short poem ‘Visa’, the opening “murmur of the sea in a shell” has become a reminder of the listener’s mortality and his or her future “burden-free journey across the Styx”, and, similarly, in ‘Yellow Studio’, Stephen Romer’s contemplation of Vuillard’s studio leads him to contemplate his own “sweet, autarchic rest”. Through a technique of repetition with tiny variations, Ireland’s Pat Boran yokes “Rabbits, swans, deer, butterflies . . .” into a litany whose coherency and unity has been forged through a memory replayed and replayed. I love Chinese poet Xi Chuan’s effortless interweaving of images, in ‘Ark’, of a “lonely locked room” and the nearby ocean, resulting in wonderful couplets such as: “Three knocks on the door reverberate in my heart / The tide leaps onto the sandy shore like a great host of turtles”.
Attempting to draw connections between seemingly unrelated phrases and images doesn’t necessarily mean the poet is trying to impose order and narrative on his or her perceptions and experience: often what is represented through these disparate associations is disorder, disunity. For example, the fragmented imagery and incongruent juxtapositions in Iranian poet Ali Abdolrezaei’s politically charged poems, published here along with audio recordings, result in texts as unstable as the subjectivities and violent landscapes they represent. Similarly, Australian Claire Potter challenges conventional modes of meaning-making in her use of ruptured syntax and ellipsis to both unite and detach sentence fragments such as “dancing in frieze”, “facing winter” and “tempting monogamy” in ‘The Appeal of Cranes’.
I imagine that each reader of this issue of PIW will notice different correlations and leitmotifs between the varied writers and their poems, just as each will see different patterns and common threads running through the personal and global events of the past ten years. As the Noughties draw to a close, enjoy navigating our final offerings of the decade.
© Sarah Ream
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