{"id":285,"date":"2014-03-05T23:15:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=285"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:31:40","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:31:40","slug":"pilbara-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=285","title":{"rendered":"Pilbara: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Petra White,\u00a0Ecopoet: O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u2018Pilbara\u2019<\/em>,\u00a0So Long Bulletin<\/a>, 2011:<\/p>\n

Ecopoetry is a recent movement, formally beginning in the early 2000s. It now has a Wikipedia entry and a Neil Astley anthology,\u00a0Earthshattering: ecopoems<\/em>. Ecopoetry, sometimes referred to as the new \u2018nature poetry\u2019, takes a distinctly ethical position regarding human relationships to nature, and considers human responsibility, rather than seeing nature as a passive reflector of human emotions. But poetry that considers our responsibility to \u2018nature\u2019 or the natural world, is not new. Astley\u2019s anthology includes figures such as Wordsworth and Clare, for example. In Australia, Mark O\u2019Connor has been consciously and explicitly writing what is now known as ecopoetry since the mid-seventies. O\u2019Connor\u2019s poetry, about the ecology of a number of Australia\u2019s natural regions including the Great Barrier Reef, the top end, various forests, and most recently the Pilbara, has always had a distinctive multi-faceted approach to the natural world, going beyond mere \u2018nature poetry\u2019 and taking in science, philosophy, history and semiotics. He has always been concerned with ethics.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I find him hard to read. There\u2019s his ego-challenging tendency to focus on an insect or a flower, with little or no reference to Me or My Wretched Soul That Seeks A Mirror. Perhaps for this reason, O\u2019Connor has always had a mixed reception in Australia. This is unfortunate: he is one of the best \u2013 and most radical \u2013 poets we have.<\/p>\n

Pilbara<\/em>\u00a0is a book-length poem of a certain epic grandeur. The Pilbara, in northern Western Australia, has some of the world\u2019s most ancient natural landscapes, dating back two billion years, and covering over 400,000 square kilometres. When O\u2019Connor visited the Pilbara, he was accompanied by the geologist Andrew Glikson \u2013 a kind of Virgil, if you will, guiding him through the geological layers of the region, which at times expand to represent layers of human history, at other times not. Though Glikson, I should add, is hardly ever present as a character in this poem.<\/p>\n

When I glanced at page 8, I thought I read \u2018deep euphoric greens\u2019 \u2013 and was quite excited by that description. It said, on second reading, \u2018eutrophic greens\u2019, meaning rich in nutrients. Such linguistic double-takes are not uncommon when reading O\u2019Connor. On the same page, we have the \u2018maria of the moon\u2019 \u2013 referring to lava flows, not the madonna, but equally a source.<\/p>\n

The poetry is highly visual: and there is often a sense of drama here that will be immediately familiar to us all from the many documentaries that prance across our 50-inch plasma screens. O\u2019Connor is visually as vivid, and then some. And there is none of the voyeurism of the BBC camera. What is made in words is made for the first time. Early in the book, a Sturt Desert Rose is born and dies with intense drama.<\/p>\n

Tough and refined,
\nof the watery family of hibiscus,
\nnamed \u2018Rose\u2019 in days
\nwhen folks still grew a single rose.<\/p>\n

The cup\u2019s petals, rigid but slanted aswirl,
\nsyncopated flamingo
\nsnapshot.<\/p>\n

Ice-lavender, silk-laced thinness,
\nare this desert lady\u2019s dowry;
\nher bridegroom, death, comes in the night;
\nno space for coyness.
\nShe\u2019s the ice-maiden who keeps
\nopen as long as life lasts
\nto the hive\u2019s brawling pandars,
\nthe night\u2019s hairy hucksters.<\/p>\n

Her downward-tilted
\ncup of petalled crinoline
\ndemurely skirts a deep, selective quest
\ntoo major to conceal.<\/p>\n

Boldly the petal-struts shiver in boisterous breeze
\nthat tests them to destruction.
\nThe organs within must trust
\ntheir craft of moisture-stiffened veins
\nto sail that desert air.<\/p>\n

Lavender ice-mantles, edge-on, can-can in the breeze.
\nDelicate veins and folded tissues
\nfence the inner purse and pollen trap.
\nIf ever a bloom played semiotic games
\nthis signals in human.
\nFire, hoof and heat ensure
\nthis beauty\u2019s print is fugitive
\nas cudded fibre
\non a camel\u2019s tongue;
\nand soon must come the seeds.<\/p>\n

So human brides make argosies of outlay.
\nTheir cloth pavilions point and do not point
\nat \u2018what they would have hit\u2019, a trick
\nthe cross-dressed, red-petalled bullfighter adores;
\nand her whirling petals semaphore
\nto where a single whorish thrust and quiver
\ngifts her the bee-borne gametes that will seed
\nthe future\u2019s dust.<\/p>\n

As the last worker withdraws
\nher compound eye still points
\nto the nanoworld within:
\na slow, bandaid-ish unpeeling
\nof spiral gene-bands that rebuild, re-join
\nto grasp the future in a heat-struck second
\n\u2013 the carpel\u2019s\u00a0carpe diem<\/em>.<\/p>\n

One day old, job done,
\nall that butterfly frippery wilts;
\nthe desert roses droop, dry-crumpled
\nlitter underneath their bush;
\nthe umbrella\u2019s papery ribs,
\nthat fought the desert\u2019s trade-wind
\n\u2013 blobs and wads of crinkled tissue<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The flower here is being carefully constructed in language, which at the same time it throws off, and is allowed to throw off. While its petals may resemble \u2018bridal silks\u2019, it is the flower who is being compared to the bride, not the other way round. And the near awkwardness of such a comparison here, with a flower that seems almost monstrous, is surprisingly haunting.<\/p>\n

This book has a classical sense of fate, an awe and respect for harshness and fragility. It is a book about time, survival, chance, beauty, the sublime, death, unintentional human cruelty, human indifference, limitation and folly. Much contemporary poetry tends to be more aware, or rather, more seeking of, our small place in the world. O\u2019Connor assumes no such place. This is a world that is indifferent to us, yet vulnerable to being damaged by us. And at the same time we are part of it. Human influence on the land is described as something intricately caught up among all of the other possible environmental influences that this land has to make sense of. In \u2018Flying over the Fortesque Plateau\u2019:<\/p>\n

Green-grey spinifex alternates with red rashers of land rubbed raw
\nby cattle. Fences invisible from the air, two or three strands of wire,
\nproduce these changes \u2013 or sometimes a dry creek that stops a grass fire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

O\u2019Connor is undeniably environmentally and morally conscious. Lines such as \u2018Enough for now \/ if humans leave what\u2019s left alone\u2019 might grate. And he is at times irritatingly didactic; but I find myself forgiving this. O\u2019Connor\u2019s environmental didacticism is not that of the 21st Century hippie. It is stated as fact; it comes as part of a delicate way of seeing. O\u2019Connor\u2019s poetic influences are classical \u2013 though he is undeniably modern, and post-modern. A precursor to O\u2019Connor, whom he has acknowledged, can be found in the Ancient Roman poet Lucretius, whose long poem \u2018On the Nature of Things\u2019 attempts to turn the eyes of his contemporaries away from their dogma about gods, and become gods themselves, by understanding, through careful observation of nature, how things simply are.<\/p>\n

In breaking away from the Romantic idea of nature as a refuge for human suffering, a backdrop for human dramas about the sublime, O\u2019Connor prises open new possibilities, new ways of seeing, and speaking of, what is there. The Pilbara is not there to soothe the troubled spirit (or body). The opening poem, effectively an epigraph to the book, establishes this: \u2018The mirage is underlined with a faint grating of haze that signals \u201cDon\u2019t believe me\u201d. Trees and lakes on the horizon have a neat underline of blue that seems to say \u201cI exist somewhere, elsewhere, not here perhaps. If in distress don\u2019t crawl this way\u201d\u2019.<\/p>\n

Why not? What does it matter which way you crawl, or what the trees might say? Surely their posited \u2018rejection\u2019 is just as humanised as their imagined embrace. What is being set up here is, if you will, a deliberately \u2018unnatural\u2019 attitude towards nature. An unconditioning, a will to see it as \u2018other\u2019, which makes it possible to begin seeing it at all. Yet human, indeed domestic, associations are what language is made of, and O\u2019Connor doesn\u2019t try to escape this. The land in winter \u2018smells of a kinder wetter time\u2019; there is \u2018an even no-mow lawn of spinifex\u2019.<\/p>\n

Even the \u2018poet\u2019 in this poem is not exclusively a human poet. On \u2018Knox Gorge\u2019, the lines: \u2018A singer sitting on a rock \/ I saw such things: and sang \/ with a broken reed, one winter\u2019s day.\u2019 Is the singer O\u2019Connor or a creature? It seems unimportant, and the song temporal (not inconsequential): \u2018I sat and felt the rock and I were one, \/though one had been here longer than the other. \/ Though one was in more hurry to be gone.\u2019 To sit and feel \u2013 something \u2013 is human, and oneness is what we can feel. And elsewhere: \u2018We, and the bird, and the river height \/ conjoin; an instant fix, in time and climate \/ across a million same-ish years\u2019. What is important here is the sense of scale: both geological and temporal. On page 31: \u2018My eye slips\/ to Caligula\u2019s years, archived \/ some metres higher.\u2019 There is a grandeur in this baffling apprehension of scale. O\u2019Connor does this frequently throughout the book, such as in \u2018At Hearsons Cove\u2019:<\/p>\n

Ancestor-figures, scratched on the gabbro\u2019s outer rust
\nprefiguring the Pharaohs<\/p>\n

decay to that granular substrate
\nwhere a lemon wattle waves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several ages come together in this image. It is of course tempting to read the lemon wattle as a small person, or a hand waving, out of this landscape of rust and decay. What strikes here is the detail: this is a movement caught in time, a small detail that is lively and waving and mortal. And tiny, of little apparent importance: but it becomes central, a movement that locates the reader in the present, and links the present to the ages past.<\/p>\n

Indeed, many of the poems can feel apocalyptic: \u2018Pilbara near Redmont\u2019 has the lines:<\/p>\n

Walking on the Archaean shield
\nof what passed for a continent then<\/p>\n

\u2013 more often shallowly flooded,
\nits seas a weak salt like fish-blood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is expansively desolate. It is balanced immediately by the intricacy of<\/p>\n

Kilometre heights of clastics and chondrites
\nwashed down to fill up, line by patient scribal line,
\nthe flat floor of a sinking sea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is an irony about \u2018the flat floor of a sinking sea\u2019. The alliteration seems to increase the sinking\/flatness. Something particularly \u2018Australian\u2019 and thong-like about it too; this line reminds me of how relaxed and quiet this poetry can often be.<\/p>\n

A line from an earlier poem, \u2018Dot Paintings\u2019 (in\u00a0The Olive Tree: Collected Poems<\/em>),\u00a0 shows O\u2019Connor is fascinated by such junctures as where \u2018the for sale culture meets the forever culture\u2019. This is a meeting that cannot be avoided, that occurs over and over again, and the beauty of this line is that it is not about people \u2013 there are no imaginary people in two camps \u2018meeting\u2019, each representing a culture, or if they are, that is not so important as the idea of the cultures themselves, and the idea that most of us are in both camps, and that these are the basic tensions of humanity that have been played out since antiquity.<\/p>\n

\u2018Trucked Cattle\u2019 has a kind of Greek chorus sung by cattle waiting in a truck by a campsite. The truck is being repaired and the cattle have no water, and will have none. The \u2018motif\u2019 of \u2018Earth\u2019 as a character, or source of primal music, \u2018Earth creaking like an old ship\u2019s timbers\u2019, pops up throughout the book, and here, the cattle\u2019s cry is an \u2018earth-shudder\u2019. Like the earth\/landscape\/geology that forms a backdrop that is imperfectly noticed if at all, the cries of the cattle are on a register that isn\u2019t experienced by the campers. The pack mentality of the cattle is mirrored in the pack mentality of the surrounding humans, who are all going about their business. There are so many ways in which the reader of this poem can hear the cattles\u2019 cry: not just a cry of \u2018bad human\u2019, or a cry to become a vegetarian. The cry is on many levels other than this. It reverberates throughout this magnificent book.<\/p>\n

A comment from Bonny Cassidy on\u00a0Ecopoet: O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u2018Pilbara\u2019<\/em>, 24.02.11:<\/p>\n

I am glad of this review. I have been reading O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u201cPilbara\u201d and also his earlier \u201cFire-Stick Farming\u201d over the last few months, and I find that he reaches toward something significant in his poetics but seems to do it almost accidentally. In a way that, for example, John Bennett, presents an ongoing ecopoetic project with its own politics and deliberation, O\u2019Connor dabbles in original ways of writing place but just as easily slips into a well-worn landscape of symbolism, archetype and poetic effect that you associate with Romanticism in this review. The example of \u201cSturt\u2019s Desert Rose\u201d is a case in point: the bloom cannot be its own plane of colour and line but must become a \u201cdesert lady\u201d, a deflating trope of feminised country that harks back to the prettifying of place in lesser Romantic and romantic poetry. Not only is she a \u201crefined\u201d lady of the outback (one thinks of our Nicole, spotless yet horseback in country not far from that pictured by O\u2019Connor) but she is the ultimate feminine: bridal, trussed and in the throes of sexual swoon; and associated with a Victorian identity (\u201ccrinoline\u201d) that once again confuses the poetic framework that O\u2019Connor brings to bear on Australian place.<\/p>\n

For me, this does not decrease the interest of his work \u2013 the richest moments in this book are enough to give it unique gravitas amongst so many re-hashings of lyrical landscapes in Australian poetry. The factual prose introductions that he provides to all of the poems except the \u201cCoda\u201d are a challenging mash of scientism and lyricism, and he continues that combination in the verse. The \u201cCoda\u201d itself is perhaps the most beautiful and whole parts of the book \u2013 truly the apotheosis of what he begins in the individual poems. His personal pronoun is hazed into the elements in which it bathes (\u201cOn my back in thermal waters at midnight\/\u2026I lie north-south\/\u2026I spin, and a zigzag of stars inverts\u201d) and the prose-anchors of the previous poems are released, allowing O\u2019Connor\u2019s voice to lift up and away into more abstracted perspectives.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/solongbulletin.tumblr.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Petra White,\u00a0Ecopoet: O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u2018Pilbara\u2019,\u00a0So Long Bulletin, 2011: Ecopoetry is a recent movement, formally beginning in the early 2000s. It now has a Wikipedia entry and a Neil Astley anthology,\u00a0Earthshattering: ecopoems. Ecopoetry, sometimes referred to as the new \u2018nature poetry\u2019, takes a distinctly ethical position regarding human relationships to nature, and considers human responsibility, rather […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}