{"id":314,"date":"2014-03-05T23:27:11","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=314"},"modified":"2014-03-13T02:02:28","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T02:02:28","slug":"recurrence-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"Recurrence: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.australianbookreview.com.au\/111-february-2014-no-358\/1848-recurrence<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, February 1, 2013:<\/em><\/p>\n

This book gives us an opportunity for a second look at the challenging and sophisticated work of Graeme Miles, his first book, Phosphorescence, having been published in 2006. In one sense nothing has changed: he remains a powerful lyric poet \u2013 his poems almost always have enough self-confidence to stay upright as well as walk with their own gait \u2013 the exact nature of whose poetic sensibility is very difficult to grasp. The first poem of that first book, \u201cNest\u201d, is an introduction to at least part of the Miles method:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The wasps are making a nest on the weight<\/i><\/p>\n

of the wind-chime, deaf, I think, to its sound,<\/i><\/p>\n

and undisturbed by its sometimes swaying<\/i><\/p>\n

for no reason. They build a paper house<\/i><\/p>\n

as a launching pad for violence in a calm.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of a final call, when waiting,<\/i><\/p>\n

feeling like the luggage is packed, the phone<\/i><\/p>\n

will ring, be answered. The house will be locked<\/i><\/p>\n

already and it\u2019ll be time to go.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The problem for a reader isn\u2019t so much of guessing the intended (and thus structuring) meaning so much as choosing between all the possible meanings since the poem is dense with allegorical possibilities. Somewhere in here is a kind of Frostian poem about the nests that creatures make, usually in inappropriate places, and how humans have to leave such havens. By a further Frostian shift, the \u201cfinal call\u201d can be read not as the language of airlines but as the final summons of death. The fact that the wasps build \u201cpaper\u201d nests suggests that the whole poem might be read as an allegory involving poetry since a poetic career is, in a sense, a \u201cpaper house\u201d. The first stanza is full of noise and movement \u2013 both of which the wasps are insensitive to \u2013 whereas the second stanza, though it is about a noise (the telephone) and a movement (the leaving) is, as a stanza, full of a kind of calm stasis. And that is reading the poem as though it were anonymous; Miles\u2019s poems tend to be full of houses, places stayed in and places left, not to mention places revisited just as they are full of movement.<\/p>\n

When I reviewed Phosphorescence on this site I clung rather desperately to an extended poem, \u201cCircle and Line\u201d, which looked as though it might provide some clues about its author\u2019s views as to what poetry was doing. In retrospect I\u2019m not sure that that was the correct procedure; one ought to able to work out such things by looking carefully at the poems. In Recurrence Miles has gone some way towards mapping at least a part of his poetic by dividing the poems into three sections: \u201cDown\u201d, \u201cAcross\u201d and \u201cUp\u201d. It is in the first of these where the significance of the titular direction is least obvious. True, a poem like \u201cLibations\u201d, traces the downward path of water, milk, honey and wine \u2013 conscious or unconscious offerings \u2013 through the earth to the point where \u201cthe only way to go on forever \/ is to become as small as nothing at all\u201d and \u201cMineral Veins\u201d explores the way that, in sleep, the self gravitates downwards towards its natural home:<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/i><\/p>\n

Then sleep<\/i><\/p>\n

is only half-sleep. Better to turn down,<\/i><\/p>\n

find you can breathe easily under a world\u2019s weight<\/i><\/p>\n

of earth, and that air was no more your element<\/i><\/p>\n

than the endless vacancy it fades to.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gravity, the prevailing god of downwards, is in fact celebrated in a poem of the same name. A large part of the expressive side of Miles\u2019s worldview is made up of mythologies, especially Classical, Norse and Indian, and so it isn\u2019t especially surprising that such a poet should begin with Hesiod\u2019s locating of Heaven, Earth and the Underworld on a vertical axis and then work through the idea of the gravity of an extreme mass as a \u201cSamadhi of space\u201d. The conclusion of the poem also makes a distinctive move, slipping effortlessly from the macro-physical to the inside of the brain: \u201cshe\u2019s all herself \/ fixing and destroying, like the colourless dot \/ at the beginning of migraine \/ that grows to swallow the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Down is allegorised out in other ways too. In \u201cThe Problem of Other Minds\u201d (the second poem of a fine sequence with the ambiguous title \u201cCauses\u201d) the movement downwards appears as a pit into which our life experiences are thrown. Again the shifts of this poem are distinctive. The initial image is an interesting one and you can imagine most poets being happy to explore it. Each of us carries a kind of black hole which is being continually stocked by our experiences as they sink into the past:<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/i><\/p>\n

All the toys I could find<\/i><\/p>\n

didn\u2019t fill it up. My thin books just lined the bottom.<\/i><\/p>\n

Put in my friends and they were small<\/i><\/p>\n

down there, craning their necks up<\/i><\/p>\n

to see what I\u2019d done to them.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Put in all the houses I\u2019d lived in, so I wouldn\u2019t<\/i><\/p>\n

have to see them again, then left my grave<\/i><\/p>\n

with a last house-load of furniture . . .<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But this poem goes on to ask about the pits of others, especially those who have disappeared into the author\u2019s own pit. It is, as its title says, really a poem about the inter-relationship of the experience of subjectivities; we are experiences for others as they are for us. Continually meditating on what we are to others \u2013 apart from our usual egoistic obsession with what we are to ourselves \u2013 shakes our sense of our own identity. After returning to his own pit (he hears it \u201cslurp as something else fell in\u201d) he sees flecks on the surface spelling out a message, \u201c\u2019What\u2019s it like \/ to be you?\u2019 And when you looked closer, \/ \u2018Is it like anything?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The same sequence has a descent poem, \u201cForgetting to Laugh\u201d, in which \u201cWhen you\u2019ve drunk the water to remember, \/ and the water to forget, they slide you down \/ into a dug-out cave\u201d. What follows is a kind of cross between a Mithraic rebirth initiation, an MRI scan and the act of dreaming, followed by the everyday \u2013 but still mysterious \u2013 process of waking. What is typical here is the way in which mythical, allegorical and metaphorical meanings, distinctive to Miles\u2019s cast of thought, are held in suspension.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final section (to proceed out of order) ought to be a simple inversion of the first but turns out to be rather different. Certainly, in Miles\u2019s poetry, the view upwards doesn\u2019t involve any simple-minded transcendence. When the eternal is considered, as in \u201cTwo Guesses at Immortality\u201d, there is no superior, heavenly reality. The two possibilities are either a kind of eternal present containing all the past (\u201cEverything is here and everyone. \/ You\u2019re home once and for all \/ at the moment when it\u2019s all new again.\u201d) or a kind of Groundhog Day endless recurrence (\u201cthe one day repeats itself \/ with its long night to be slept through\u201d.<\/p>\n

In other poems, like \u201cDioscuri\u201d, the emphasis is on the reciprocity between the upper and lower worlds though \u201cAbove, Below\u201d contradicts the old relationship of as above so below to contrast the love of the immortals for mortals (\u201ca gold-haired boy or girl . . . too squeamish to stay \/ for the squalid fact of your death\u201d) for that of mortals for mortals \u2013 in this case parents for children:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the ones who wait below<\/i><\/p>\n

will only be as frightening as necessity,<\/i><\/p>\n

quiet farmers keeping their kids<\/i><\/p>\n

from the dangerous machines and the gun.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the metaphoric associations of downwards in the earlier poems is the idea of descent through the family line and so it is, in a kind of way, logical that a poem about the poet\u2019s parents and grandparent should be associated with a look upwards. \u201cVerandah\u201d is a really fine poem, familiar from its appearance in John Leonard\u2019s Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and though verandahs \u2013 the quintessential Australian liminal space \u2013 might suggest movement across, there is a certain rightness in this poem\u2019s appearing in the final, Up section. It is also, of course, an example of a modern version of a classical invocation, summoning mother and father out of the past into the present.<\/p>\n

Ultimately the vision affirmed is a humanist one and two poems, \u201cShivery to Think of the Long Spaces\u201d and \u201cAscesis\u201d make this fairly clear. The former begins as a view upwards to the stars, recalling Pascal\u2019s or perhaps Slessor\u2019s poem \u2018s fear of the spaces between the stars, spaces which have become even more mindboggling vast since the twentieth century\u2019s development of cosmological measurement. The result of this perspective is described as \u201cshivery while it\u2019s measured \/ by this piece of skin\u201d but the poem goes on to imagine a perspective beyond humanism where there is \u201cobject with no subject\u201d where \u201cthe suns flame silently\u201d in their death throes \u201cand don\u2019t return from their last \/ going under, don\u2019t care to\u201d.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final poem, \u201cAscesis\u201d, seems to have an unequivocally humanist perspective as it mocks the results of labouring to be released upwards into the cosmos, free of the earthbinding sins of the body:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They let go,<\/i><\/p>\n

lift clear of weather,<\/i><\/p>\n

soil\u2019s vapours<\/i><\/p>\n

that tint the mind like plot.<\/i><\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/i><\/p>\n

Free of conversation,<\/i><\/p>\n

the long dispute of history, language<\/i><\/p>\n

is crisp as salt, and with no air<\/i><\/p>\n

to talk through their words are flawless,<\/i><\/p>\n

discrete and unanswerable.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Both of these poems casually mention orbits and straight lines and one can\u2019t help feeling that this interest derives from \u201cCircle and Line\u201d in Phosphorescence. Miles\u2019s poetic world, as readers who have got this far will register, is a complex one.<\/p>\n

A reader who expected the Up poems to be about transcendence might well come to the book\u2019s middle section expecting poems of narrative and Ovidian transformation and, it is true, there is a lot of that to be found there. It begins with \u201cPhotis\u201d, a suite of poems (also familiar from Leonard\u2019s anthology) that form a narrative about an artist inclined to bring out animal shapes in the bodies of those who sit for portraits. A lover whose self-image is that of a hawk finds through the process of art that his totemic animal is, instead, the ass (for those of us who missed it, the book\u2019s blurb points out an allusion here to Apuleius). When a baby is born \u2013 going through its own metamorphoses in the womb and then outside \u2013 it becomes an anthology of animals:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Your soft skin is full of animals. There are<\/i><\/p>\n

fishes in the movement of your sucking cheeks, reptiles<\/i><\/p>\n

in the glaze of your eyes overtired, the stillness of a kangaroo<\/i><\/p>\n

when you watch light slide<\/i><\/p>\n

over the ceiling . . . . .<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the artist\u2019s work undergoes an equally profound metamorphosis, focussing on the world her child might live in rather than the animals under its skin: \u201cshe paints the night as a newsreel of frightening things, \/ waters above and below\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAriadne on Naxos\u201d, based on the version of the story found in Plutarch\u2019s life of Theseus, focusses on the way an individual can transform into a complicated set of rituals; \u201cAggregore\u201d revisits the idea of a child\u2019s evolution in the womb; \u201cAt the End of the Seventies \u2013 Streets in Marmion\u201d reproduces the way in which a beachscape is transformed when it is seen by moonlight; \u201cChennai\u201d looks at the way individuals (or families) are always the centre of their own universe and carry their own gods and experiences with them in environments that are utterly different and a related poem, \u201cDiminuendo\u201d, imagines, from the distant location of India, all of the houses previously lived in since birth as a concertina opened out into one of those medieval maps.<\/p>\n

This threefold division of the book is useful, but I cannot help feeling that it isn\u2019t much more than a guide, uncovering only a small portion of what is in these poems and what animates them and gives them their integrity. If I had to focus on a single poem as an entrance into the poems of this book I would choose one from the first section, \u201cPurusha\u201d, which links the Norse proto-god Ymir with a similar figure from Indian mythology:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ymir, who is Purusha, the Person, is sacrificed<\/i><\/p>\n

but goes on. Its skin is cinematic, the light<\/i><\/p>\n

breaks through it. Endless eyes watch it<\/i><\/p>\n

sliding by. Its body is standing waves<\/i><\/p>\n

frozen, and it crinkles with crystals of ice,<\/i><\/p>\n

empties into the roaring absorption, the nuclear<\/i><\/p>\n

introspection of suns. Its sound is the crowd<\/i><\/p>\n

roaring in Geiger-counters, it goes on forever<\/i><\/p>\n

and mostly is invisible.<\/i><\/p>\n

Moves down<\/i><\/p>\n

and down is the static blur of sandgrains, the place<\/i><\/p>\n

that barters crops for corpses.<\/i><\/p>\n

Moves across<\/i><\/p>\n

inventing plot, walks on or runs<\/i><\/p>\n

forever in Zeno\u2019s physics.<\/i><\/p>\n

Moves up<\/i><\/p>\n

spies out the thinning, the spinning direction<\/i><\/p>\n

of vertigo.<\/i><\/p>\n

It\u2019s promiscuous and virginal, celibate<\/i><\/p>\n

and incestuous. It\u2019s family at war with itself.<\/i><\/p>\n

When a standing ape looks up it sees<\/i><\/p>\n

air catch fire, water<\/i><\/p>\n

thicken with mud, harden to land.<\/i><\/p>\n

Objects are smashed in the slow riot<\/i><\/p>\n

and the prickling of skin when reading a poem<\/i><\/p>\n

is each pore expecting a bruise<\/i><\/p>\n

to cover it. And the poems fit together<\/i><\/p>\n

like a dry-stone wall, jagged edge<\/i><\/p>\n

to edge, just making do.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps this should be thought of not as poem-as-key but as poem-as-digest (or, anatomy) since one can hear nearly all of the poems in Recurrence in this single work. The central section is a compressed explanation of the three directions and the over-riding image of the fate of Ymir (whose blood becomes the sea, whose skull becomes the sky and whose bones and teeth become rocks) as a sacrifice whose body goes on changing and expressing itself in the activities of the humans who live on and within him echoes throughout the book, down even to the poem about the child\u2019s cutting his first teeth. Even the interest in light in the second and third lines recalls a number of poems.<\/p>\n

Recurrence certainly complicates the world of Phosphorescence (itself complicated enough) and it would take a review longer than this to go back to that first book and reread it in the light of this second one. Eventually it will have to be done but I will leave that for the appearance of Miles\u2019s third book \u2013 something that admirers like myself will hope happens quickly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Ali Jane Smith, The Australian , March 16, 2013:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026A dictionary of mythology (or a search engine) may be handy when reading Graeme Miles\u2019s Recurrence, though there are notes to some of the poems at the end of the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Despite Miles\u2019s interest in the antique, the book is peppered with moments of recognition: family relationships, friendships, old houses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a poem describing the feeling that often goes with the contemplation of the celestial, Shivery to think of the long spaces (the title does half the work of the poem), though this poet also describes human experience with a warmth and ease that reassures us that his visits to the dark places of the universe are more a theoretical testing than an existential crisis. Miles has written the best \u2013 probably the only \u2013 poem I have read about a baby\u2019s teething, and then there are lines like these:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I put you down<\/i><\/p>\n

to bed I hold my face close to yours<\/i><\/p>\n

to hear the ascents and descents in wakefulness,<\/i><\/p>\n

quickenings and slowings of breath. My head<\/i><\/p>\n

beside yours is leonine,<\/i><\/p>\n

not with the savagery of hunting, but the rough nuzzle of the pride.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old world, the world of Recurrence, a world connected to the past through old stories, generations linked through breath, and the repetition of experience\u2026<\/p>\n

The problem for a reader isn\u2019t so much of guessing the intended (and thus structuring) meaning so much as choosing between all the possible meanings since the poem is dense with allegorical possibilities. Somewhere in here is a kind of Frostian poem about the nests that creatures make, usually in inappropriate places, and how humans have to leave such havens. By a further Frostian shift, the \u201cfinal call\u201d can be read not as the language of airlines but as the final summons of death. The fact that the wasps build \u201cpaper\u201d nests suggests that the whole poem might be read as an allegory involving poetry since a poetic career is, in a sense, a \u201cpaper house\u201d. The first stanza is full of noise and movement \u2013 both of which the wasps are insensitive to \u2013 whereas the second stanza, though it is about a noise (the telephone) and a movement (the leaving) is, as a stanza, full of a kind of calm stasis. And that is reading the poem as though it were anonymous; Miles\u2019s poems tend to be full of houses, places stayed in and places left, not to mention places revisited just as they are full of movement.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I reviewed Phosphorescence on this site I clung rather desperately to an extended poem, \u201cCircle and Line\u201d, which looked as though it might provide some clues about its author\u2019s views as to what poetry was doing. In retrospect I\u2019m not sure that that was the correct procedure; one ought to able to work out such things by looking carefully at the poems. In Recurrence Miles has gone some way towards mapping at least a part of his poetic by dividing the poems into three sections: \u201cDown\u201d, \u201cAcross\u201d and \u201cUp\u201d. It is in the first of these where the significance of the titular direction is least obvious. True, a poem like \u201cLibations\u201d, traces the downward path of water, milk, honey and wine \u2013 conscious or unconscious offerings \u2013 through the earth to the point where \u201cthe only way to go on forever \/ is to become as small as nothing at all\u201d and \u201cMineral Veins\u201d explores the way that, in sleep, the self gravitates downwards towards its natural home:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

Then sleep<\/p>\n

is only half-sleep. Better to turn down,<\/p>\n

find you can breathe easily under a world\u2019s weight<\/p>\n

of earth, and that air was no more your element<\/p>\n

than the endless vacancy it fades to.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gravity, the prevailing god of downwards, is in fact celebrated in a poem of the same name. A large part of the expressive side of Miles\u2019s worldview is made up of mythologies, especially Classical, Norse and Indian, and so it isn\u2019t especially surprising that such a poet should begin with Hesiod\u2019s locating of Heaven, Earth and the Underworld on a vertical axis and then work through the idea of the gravity of an extreme mass as a \u201cSamadhi of space\u201d. The conclusion of the poem also makes a distinctive move, slipping effortlessly from the macro-physical to the inside of the brain: \u201cshe\u2019s all herself \/ fixing and destroying, like the colourless dot \/ at the beginning of migraine \/ that grows to swallow the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Down is allegorised out in other ways too. In \u201cThe Problem of Other Minds\u201d (the second poem of a fine sequence with the ambiguous title \u201cCauses\u201d) the movement downwards appears as a pit into which our life experiences are thrown. Again the shifts of this poem are distinctive. The initial image is an interesting one and you can imagine most poets being happy to explore it. Each of us carries a kind of black hole which is being continually stocked by our experiences as they sink into the past:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

All the toys I could find<\/p>\n

didn\u2019t fill it up. My thin books just lined the bottom.<\/p>\n

Put in my friends and they were small<\/p>\n

down there, craning their necks up<\/p>\n

to see what I\u2019d done to them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Put in all the houses I\u2019d lived in, so I wouldn\u2019t<\/p>\n

have to see them again, then left my grave<\/p>\n

with a last house-load of furniture . . .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But this poem goes on to ask about the pits of others, especially those who have disappeared into the author\u2019s own pit. It is, as its title says, really a poem about the inter-relationship of the experience of subjectivities; we are experiences for others as they are for us. Continually meditating on what we are to others \u2013 apart from our usual egoistic obsession with what we are to ourselves \u2013 shakes our sense of our own identity. After returning to his own pit (he hears it \u201cslurp as something else fell in\u201d) he sees flecks on the surface spelling out a message, \u201c\u2019What\u2019s it like \/ to be you?\u2019 And when you looked closer, \/ \u2018Is it like anything?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The same sequence has a descent poem, \u201cForgetting to Laugh\u201d, in which \u201cWhen you\u2019ve drunk the water to remember, \/ and the water to forget, they slide you down \/ into a dug-out cave\u201d. What follows is a kind of cross between a Mithraic rebirth initiation, an MRI scan and the act of dreaming, followed by the everyday \u2013 but still mysterious \u2013 process of waking. What is typical here is the way in which mythical, allegorical and metaphorical meanings, distinctive to Miles\u2019s cast of thought, are held in suspension.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final section (to proceed out of order) ought to be a simple inversion of the first but turns out to be rather different. Certainly, in Miles\u2019s poetry, the view upwards doesn\u2019t involve any simple-minded transcendence. When the eternal is considered, as in \u201cTwo Guesses at Immortality\u201d, there is no superior, heavenly reality. The two possibilities are either a kind of eternal present containing all the past (\u201cEverything is here and everyone. \/ You\u2019re home once and for all \/ at the moment when it\u2019s all new again.\u201d) or a kind of Groundhog Day endless recurrence (\u201cthe one day repeats itself \/ with its long night to be slept through\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In other poems, like \u201cDioscuri\u201d, the emphasis is on the reciprocity between the upper and lower worlds though \u201cAbove, Below\u201d contradicts the old relationship of as above so below to contrast the love of the immortals for mortals (\u201ca gold-haired boy or girl . . . too squeamish to stay \/ for the squalid fact of your death\u201d) for that of mortals for mortals \u2013 in this case parents for children:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But the ones who wait below<\/p>\n

will only be as frightening as necessity,<\/p>\n

quiet farmers keeping their kids<\/p>\n

from the dangerous machines and the gun.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the metaphoric associations of downwards in the earlier poems is the idea of descent through the family line and so it is, in a kind of way, logical that a poem about the poet\u2019s parents and grandparent should be associated with a look upwards. \u201cVerandah\u201d is a really fine poem, familiar from its appearance in John Leonard\u2019s Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and though verandahs \u2013 the quintessential Australian liminal space \u2013 might suggest movement across, there is a certain rightness in this poem\u2019s appearing in the final, Up section. It is also, of course, an example of a modern version of a classical invocation, summoning mother and father out of the past into the present.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ultimately the vision affirmed is a humanist one and two poems, \u201cShivery to Think of the Long Spaces\u201d and \u201cAscesis\u201d make this fairly clear. The former begins as a view upwards to the stars, recalling Pascal\u2019s or perhaps Slessor\u2019s poem \u2018s fear of the spaces between the stars, spaces which have become even more mindboggling vast since the twentieth century\u2019s development of cosmological measurement. The result of this perspective is described as \u201cshivery while it\u2019s measured \/ by this piece of skin\u201d but the poem goes on to imagine a perspective beyond humanism where there is \u201cobject with no subject\u201d where \u201cthe suns flame silently\u201d in their death throes \u201cand don\u2019t return from their last \/ going under, don\u2019t care to\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The book\u2019s final poem, \u201cAscesis\u201d, seems to have an unequivocally humanist perspective as it mocks the results of labouring to be released upwards into the cosmos, free of the earthbinding sins of the body:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They let go,<\/p>\n

lift clear of weather,<\/p>\n

soil\u2019s vapours<\/p>\n

that tint the mind like plot.<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

Free of conversation,<\/p>\n

the long dispute of history, language<\/p>\n

is crisp as salt, and with no air<\/p>\n

to talk through their words are flawless,<\/p>\n

discrete and unanswerable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Both of these poems casually mention orbits and straight lines and one can\u2019t help feeling that this interest derives from \u201cCircle and Line\u201d in Phosphorescence. Miles\u2019s poetic world, as readers who have got this far will register, is a complex one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A reader who expected the Up poems to be about transcendence might well come to the book\u2019s middle section expecting poems of narrative and Ovidian transformation and, it is true, there is a lot of that to be found there. It begins with \u201cPhotis\u201d, a suite of poems (also familiar from Leonard\u2019s anthology) that form a narrative about an artist inclined to bring out animal shapes in the bodies of those who sit for portraits. A lover whose self-image is that of a hawk finds through the process of art that his totemic animal is, instead, the ass (for those of us who missed it, the book\u2019s blurb points out an allusion here to Apuleius). When a baby is born \u2013 going through its own metamorphoses in the womb and then outside \u2013 it becomes an anthology of animals:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Your soft skin is full of animals. There are<\/p>\n

fishes in the movement of your sucking cheeks, reptiles<\/p>\n

in the glaze of your eyes overtired, the stillness of a kangaroo<\/p>\n

when you watch light slide<\/p>\n

over the ceiling . . . . .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And the artist\u2019s work undergoes an equally profound metamorphosis, focussing on the world her child might live in rather than the animals under its skin: \u201cshe paints the night as a newsreel of frightening things, \/ waters above and below\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cAriadne on Naxos\u201d, based on the version of the story found in Plutarch\u2019s life of Theseus, focusses on the way an individual can transform into a complicated set of rituals; \u201cAggregore\u201d revisits the idea of a child\u2019s evolution in the womb; \u201cAt the End of the Seventies \u2013 Streets in Marmion\u201d reproduces the way in which a beachscape is transformed when it is seen by moonlight; \u201cChennai\u201d looks at the way individuals (or families) are always the centre of their own universe and carry their own gods and experiences with them in environments that are utterly different and a related poem, \u201cDiminuendo\u201d, imagines, from the distant location of India, all of the houses previously lived in since birth as a concertina opened out into one of those medieval maps.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This threefold division of the book is useful, but I cannot help feeling that it isn\u2019t much more than a guide, uncovering only a small portion of what is in these poems and what animates them and gives them their integrity. If I had to focus on a single poem as an entrance into the poems of this book I would choose one from the first section, \u201cPurusha\u201d, which links the Norse proto-god Ymir with a similar figure from Indian mythology:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ymir, who is Purusha, the Person, is sacrificed<\/p>\n

but goes on. Its skin is cinematic, the light<\/p>\n

breaks through it. Endless eyes watch it<\/p>\n

sliding by. Its body is standing waves<\/p>\n

frozen, and it crinkles with crystals of ice,<\/p>\n

empties into the roaring absorption, the nuclear<\/p>\n

introspection of suns. Its sound is the crowd<\/p>\n

roaring in Geiger-counters, it goes on forever<\/p>\n

and mostly is invisible.<\/p>\n

Moves down<\/p>\n

and down is the static blur of sandgrains, the place<\/p>\n

that barters crops for corpses.<\/p>\n

Moves across<\/p>\n

inventing plot, walks on or runs<\/p>\n

forever in Zeno\u2019s physics.<\/p>\n

Moves up<\/p>\n

spies out the thinning, the spinning direction<\/p>\n

of vertigo.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s promiscuous and virginal, celibate<\/p>\n

and incestuous. It\u2019s family at war with itself.<\/p>\n

When a standing ape looks up it sees<\/p>\n

air catch fire, water<\/p>\n

thicken with mud, harden to land.<\/p>\n

Objects are smashed in the slow riot<\/p>\n

and the prickling of skin when reading a poem<\/p>\n

is each pore expecting a bruise<\/p>\n

to cover it. And the poems fit together<\/p>\n

like a dry-stone wall, jagged edge<\/p>\n

to edge, just making do.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps this should be thought of not as poem-as-key but as poem-as-digest (or, anatomy) since one can hear nearly all of the poems in Recurrence in this single work. The central section is a compressed explanation of the three directions and the over-riding image of the fate of Ymir (whose blood becomes the sea, whose skull becomes the sky and whose bones and teeth become rocks) as a sacrifice whose body goes on changing and expressing itself in the activities of the humans who live on and within him echoes throughout the book, down even to the poem about the child\u2019s cutting his first teeth. Even the interest in light in the second and third lines recalls a number of poems.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Recurrence certainly complicates the world of Phosphorescence (itself complicated enough) and it would take a review longer than this to go back to that first book and reread it in the light of this second one. Eventually it will have to be done but I will leave that for the appearance of Miles\u2019s third book \u2013 something that admirers like myself will hope happens quickly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From Ali Jane Smith, The Australian, March 16, 2013:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026A dictionary of mythology (or a search engine) may be handy when reading Graeme Miles\u2019s Recurrence, though there are notes to some of the poems at the end of the book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Despite Miles\u2019s interest in the antique, the book is peppered with moments of recognition: family relationships, friendships, old houses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a poem describing the feeling that often goes with the contemplation of the celestial, Shivery to think of the long spaces (the title does half the work of the poem), though this poet also describes human experience with a warmth and ease that reassures us that his visits to the dark places of the universe are more a theoretical testing than an existential crisis. Miles has written the best \u2013 probably the only \u2013 poem I have read about a baby\u2019s teething, and then there are lines like these:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I put you down<\/p>\n

to bed I hold my face close to yours<\/p>\n

to hear the ascents and descents in wakefulness,<\/p>\n

quickenings and slowings of breath. My head<\/p>\n

beside yours is leonine,<\/p>\n

not with the savagery of hunting, but the rough nuzzle of the pride.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old world, the world of Recurrence, a world connected to the past through old stories, generations linked through breath, and the repetition of experience\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.australianbookreview.com.au\/111-february-2014-no-358\/1848-recurrence   From Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review, February 1, 2013: This book gives us an opportunity for a second look at the challenging and sophisticated work of Graeme Miles, his first book, Phosphorescence, having been published in 2006. In one sense nothing has changed: he remains a powerful lyric poet \u2013 his poems almost […]<\/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\/314"}],"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=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}