#PoetryMonth Surge

• Author: Jay Bernard (1988)
  
• Title: Surge (31 short poems)
  
• Published: 2019
• List of Challenges 2021
• Monthly plan
• #PoetryMonth (April 2021)
• #ReadingDiversity

Introduction:

1. For those readers of Jay Bernard’s debut Surge who are
2. not familiar with the historical event to which it responds,
3. there is a carefully detailed author’s foreword.
4. On 18 January 1981, 13 black teenagers were killed in a
5. house fire that engulfed a birthday party at in south-east London.
6. Although the New Cross Fire is still in living memory,
7. Jay Bernard is seeking to introduce it to a new generation
8. …to make history live and remind readers these are both statistics and people.

Conclusion:

1. I haven’t even opened the book but I feel this will be an emotional journey.
2. This time I’m reading the book while  listening to the audio book.
3. I will just let Bernard’s words wash over me.
4. Each poem has a different voice…a gathering of people.
5. Parallels are drawn between the New Cross Fire 1981 and Grenfell
6. the tower block fire in 2017 where the official death toll was 72.
7. Surge” tells a story of the  past and present
8. …showing how lessons have not been learnt.
9. #Impressive

Last thoughts:  5 poems that focus on the aftermath….haunting.

1. Harbour: a ghost child going over the events in the fire…telling friends
2. to save themselves:   “I said, I called – jump”

1. Clearing: The speaker is a victim of the fire and describes
2. how the body is placed in body bag.

1. “+”   The mother of a victim is informed they have a yellow shirt
2. …the mother says:  “…this must be our son.”

1. “-”    The voice is of the victim lying dead on a morgue table
2. about to be identified  “You came, dad –“

1. Kitchen:   The voice of a victim returns to her home
2. ….loving she describes  the kitchen
3. “I have held this house in my arms
4. …and let it sob on the bathroom floor.”

#ReadingIrelandMonth21 “Still” (poem)

• Title: Still
  
• Author: Felicia Olusanya (aka FeliSpeaks)
  
• Genre: poem
  
• Published: 2020
  
• List of Challenges 2021
• Monthly reading plan
• #ReadingIrelandMonth21 @cathy746books

 

Introduction:

1. RTÉ commissioned  STILL to aptly describe and capture
2. Ireland’s reaction to the deadly virus.
3. It puts forward the reality of our current uncertainty.
4. Ms Olusanya was born in Nigeria and moved to Ireland with her mother.
5. She has settled  in Longford where her application for refugee status was accepted.
6. Core message:
7. Covid-19 virus It is touching us all in different ways and different degrees.
8. The only thing we can do for each other right now
9. ...is to remain as still as possible.
10. It is how we can save each otherl

 

Still.

Covid came.

And Ireland stood still.

Shocked at how much could gather at our doorsteps – like dust.

We wrestled with what we might, What we may, How life would continue, the ways it must.

Stood still.

The virus ate through limbs of every family tree,

It choked out the lives we’d built roots around,

It emptied out purses; cutting money by the foot,

Rendered hearts bruised and persons forgotten, Left us breathless. For dead.

Still.

We closed into ourselves.

We folded behind lock and key, Inhaled through the fogs of uncertainty,

We found fun in the walls of our homes,

Made it work, Fashioned it for play,

Carved out sections we can fill joy with,

So we can hold it firm on the days we didn’t know what we next, what could happen.

Stood still.

For those whom age had known beyond a golden jubilee,

whose eyes glaze with film reel memories,

whose daughters have vowed to love them in their sunset,

whose sons have kissed them in their sunrise.

We want your vision of us in full colour.

Stood still.

For the Frontline workers armed with nothing but faith,

For the emerging minds that must dare to dream in high definition,

For the lonely minds that are glaring at love through a screen,

For the bodies that create homes in cardboard shelters.

Still.

For you. Ireland is standing still.

But tomorrow, when our knees get soft with impatience and the gates of our homes swing open,

Which way will our legs go?

Which path does our heart know?

 

#Poetry Jericho Brown

• Author: Jericho Brown (1976)
  
• Title: The Tradition
  
• Published: 2019
  
• Trivia: I liked 29 poems of total 52 = 55 %  (good score)
  
• 2020 winner Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, finalist
• 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, longlist
• List of Challenges 2021
• Monthly plan
• #PoetryMonth (April 2021)
  

 

Conclusion:

1. This  book is said to be
2. …one of the best collection of poems
3. by a living poet.
4. Jericho Brown’s poems are works of art and
5. …they deserve some of my intense reading time.
6. It took me 2 days to research and read 52 poems.
7. I learned about Brown’s abusive father and  the poet’s
8. struggle to be a black gay man.
9. I hope the notes I provided may
10. …help you when reading my favorite poems.
11. #MustRead

 

Quickscan:

1. 5 Duplex poems are a creation of Jericho Brown (JB).
2. The structure is unique: the last word of a stanza
3. ….in the last word on the first next line!
4. It feels like a puzzel!

 

Quickscan:

1. Certain poems are inspired by people, books, art.
2. I needed to read the ‘backstory’ in wikipedia 
3. …so I  could understand the poems. 
4. I’ve included links to information regarding these poems.
5. Favorite: ” After Another Country”  (novel by James Baldwin, 1962)

 

Quickscan:

1. The title poem is “The Tradition“.
2. After my first reading I still did not know what it was!
3. I needed to do some research.
4. Tradition is: 
5. joy of gardening,  police violence, remembering victims of police violence.

 

Favorites:

Part 1:

• Ganymede – myth about Ganymede   
  
• As a Human Being  –  trying to stand up to father…..son-father relationship.
• The Tradition – see quickscan
• Hero – trying to impress mother….  son-mother relationship
• After Another Country – Another Country main character Rufus Scott 
• The Water Lilies – image  water lilies = white people
• Foreday in the Morning – morining glories…mother never sees them, she’s up early to work.
• The Card Tables – love the personification of simpel ‘card tables’, funny!
• Bullet Points – Sandra Bland (wikipedia) 
• Duplex  – abuse-father
  
• The Trees – lovely nature poem..the crape myrtle trees
• A Young Man – father watching teen-age son be a playground guardian for little sister

 

Part 2:

• Duplex – abuse-father
• Riddle – Emmett Till (wikipedia)  – powerful
• Correspondence – The Jerome Project by Titus Kaphar  
• Night Shift – painful intimacies of domestic abuse
• Shovel – vivd poem, no  hidden meaning…just pick up the body and bury it
• Dear Whiteness – letter to “whiteness” …who the speaker is sleeping with
• Entertainment Industry – issues of gun control and mass shootings
• Layover – account of an assault, a pant-like stream-of-consciousness

 

Part 3:

• Duplex – abuse-father
• Of My Fury – love poem
• The Virus  – HIV
• Deliverance – remembering childhood Sundays
• Dark – painfully candid as JB reproaches himself
• Duplex  – abuse-father
• Cakewalk – optimism between to old lovers despite HIV
• Stand – love and pain is inseparable, there is joy to be found  within black bodies
• Duplex: Cento – abuse-father

#AusReadingMonth2020 Les Murray

• Les Murray  landscape…
• Murray’s work helped raise Australia’s  poetry to a level of global importance.

 

• Author: Les Murray
  
• Title: Waiting for the Past: Poems
  
• Published: 2015
  
• Trivia:  Queensland Literary Awards for Poetry Collection (2015)
• Bingo card:  NSW
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly plan
• #AusReadingMonth2020  @Bronasbooks
  

 

Notes:

1. Note: Murray’s poetry is deeply interested in memory
2. …the past catching up.
3. Note: Les Murray favors sound-patterns over strict rules of form.
4. …through repeating patterns of alliteration and assonance, consonance.
5. Note: I liked Murray’s explanation: prose is narrow speak…poetry is wide speak!
6. Note: Of course the moment you read a poem influences your reaction to it.
7. We are now in quarantimes …
8. Murray’s first two stanzas in his  poem  ‘Self and Dream Self’
9. ….struck a  “corona” nerve:

Routines of decaying time
fade, and your waking life
gets laborious as science.

You huddle in, becoming
the deathless younger self
who will survive your dreams
and vanish in surviving.

 

1. The Black Beaches
2. This was a poem I would never have understood without some help.
3. What is peat? What is coal?
4. ….what is Murray trying to say?
5. Important to understand more about
6. peat —>> coal in order to understand the poem!

1. Theme: different lengths of time
2. Very slow geological time to form coal
3. 24 hr time….sun returning from half hid forest
4. Instant time…frost disappears in a “sugar lick”

1. Peat is not actually coal, but rather the precursor to coal.
2. Peat is a soft organic material consisting of
3. partly decayed plant and, in some cases,
   deposited mineral matter. When peat is
4. placed under high pressure and heat, it becomes coal.
5. Peat is the first step in the formation of coal. 
6. In order to be turned into coal,
7. the peat must be buried from 4-10 km deep by sediment.

 

1. When Two Percent Were Students
2. Murray tells us how felt, what he saw
3. …when he returned home after university:
4. “when rush hours were so tough…a heart attack might get stepped on”
5. “widows with no facelift of joy…spat their irons”
6. “Host of depression time and wartime….hated their failure…which was you.“

• Poem:  Dynamic Rest  (…all about these little birds, terns.)

1. Dynamic and Rest
2. Just a very simple poem…about birds, terns.
3. It is one of my favorites.
4. Murray’s power of observation is the key to his poetry.
5. A simple bird, the wind, the sand and he weaves it all into perfection.
6. Title is an oxymoron.
7. Birds facing a ‘brunt wind’
8. …the wind affects the birds on the ground.
9. Their ‘feet have to grip the sand’.
10. There was constant movement ‘terns rising up through terns’.
11. The poem illustrates there is constant movement
12. ….in this attempt of rest.

 

1. The Care
2. Touching poem introduced and read by the poet himself
3. …in his gravelly Australian voice: LISTEN

 

1. The Last Hellos (…again title is oxymoron)
2. Beautiful elegy for his troubled father..
3. “Don’t die Dad, but they die….”
4. ““People can’t say goodbye / any more. They say last hellos.”

 

Last  Thoughts:

1. How do you read a book of 64 poems?
2. The best thing to do is  Google each poem before reading it.
3. Get the feel of the poem…some insight. Then read the poem
4. That is what I did.
5. The poems are all under a page or two in word length.
6. Perfect for reading and re-reading in
7. order to gain maximum pleasure and understanding.
8. Of all the articles I read…The New Yorker presented the best
9. article written by Anna Heyward.
10. She gives an excellent  description of who Les Murray was.
11. If you read Les Murray in the future…start
12. with this link:  The Homegrown Language of Les Murray
13. Absolutely blown away by Les Murray’s words
14. …he is as Aussie as a billabong by an old gum tree.
15. So glad I took the time during #AusReadingMonth2020
16. …to discover this Australian national treasure, Les Murray.
17. #MustRead
18. Score: A+++++++

#Poetry Empirical

• Title: Empirical
  
• Author: Lisa Gorton (1972) – Poet and Oxford scholar
  
• Genre: poetry
  
• Published: 2019
  
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly reading plan
• Bingo card: VIC
  
• Trivia: Shortlist 2020 – Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
• #AusReadingMonth2020 @Bronasbooks
• #AWW2020  @AustralianWomenWriters

 

Introduction:

1. Empirical  means  relying on observation.
2. Book cover: Statue of Aphrodite as a symbol of the ‘beauty of the world.
3. Goal book: Teach us to appreciate a different beauty no longer in its original form.
4. Inspiration/timeline:
5. Ms Gorton started Empirical  in 2014.
6. She had learned that the Victorian government planned an
7. 8-lane highway through Melbourne’s Royal Park.
8. Ms Gorton researched the colonial history of Melbourne
9. …a young city on ancient land.
10. She tries to understand how a feeling for place originates.

 

Quickscan:

1. Part 1:  Empirical I-VII document the poet’s walks
2. through the Royal Park  where an eight-lane motorway
3. through Royal Park is to be contructed.
4. Part 2: Crystal Palace: poems that include meditations on t
5. he Great Exhibition’s antiquities and exhibits.

 

Empirical I

Summary: (believable…)

1. Poet walks in the mounds of rubble and shattered concrete
2. dumped in 2-3  near a factory, train line.
3. Poet describes the weeds and grasses that have
4. taken root in these mounds: head-high fennel,
5. milk thistle, dandelion and tussock
6. Note: New Zealand’s native grasslands are tussocks –
7. grasses that grow in the form of a clump.
8. The tussock shape protects the plant, and helps it survive fire and drought.)
9. Poet feels she is in an abyss and the weeds, grasses,
10. mounds of rubble give the scenes a sense of place.
11. It is a wilderness to itself, closed.

 

Tussock

 

Empirical II

Summary: (strange…)

1. Poet continues to walk in the acres of rubble and grasses.
2. She ‘vanishes into my life again’ (imagination)
3. …with thoughts of this place as it was centuries ago.
4. She asks the reader if we see the figures among the stones
5. ….their worlds covered in rubble.
6. Poet sees fragments of vases or urns and imagines Caesar gesturing…

 

Empirical III:

Summary: (again….very strange)
These words in Empirical I-II-III have NO emotional effect on this reader at all!

1. Poet discovers a concrete table and chairs on the edge of the field
2. She imagines the table set with various items: plates, cutlery, napkins in their rings, long stemmed
3. glasses under a hanging lamp and a lion-footed salt cellar.
4. Poet imagines ‘we’ (reader and poet?) sit and eat…..and ‘they’ (imaginary others??) vanish.
5. The ‘others’ retreat and the ‘dining room’ is seen disappearing into a vanishing point, Droste effect.
6. This effect represents the poet’s dream of landscape enclosing yet another dream of landscape .

 

Droste effect

 

Empirical IV:

Summary: (…it is not getting any better)

1. Poet again describes grasses, seedbeds, and thistledown.
2. She looks at the ‘front of now into the unreal scene out back’ and compares it to a
3. drawing in perspective with lines shooting as far as the eye can see.
4. Drawing on Empirical I the poet again refers to a factory, train line and envisages them
5. ‘where your acts naturalise as monuments’.
6. She compares them to a broken statues that ‘lies engulfed in grass’
7. The entire scene is ‘a ruinable strangeness’
8. that leads back to where she is sitting in head-high grass.

 

Empirical V:

Summary: (…the poet is speaking in circles with emphasis ‘grasses’)

 

1. Tussock, rattling fennel tendrils from the root
2. —speargrass with a rain wind and the grasses moving many way like shivers.
   Poet invents a landscape (imagination)
3. …a ruinable see-through drawn into the plan in thought.
4. Again the poet goes on about grasses:
5. …in head-high grass, its pale seedbeds….
   …the grass untidy, touchable, steeply its slant
   …going in through leaf-clatter, corner branches out to where—
   …privet (note: evergreen shrub) and the green palings (note: fences)
6. Finally a lucid thought I can cling to:
   “…the road will come through here—“

 

Fennel

 

Speargrass

 

Empirical VI:

Summary: (…bizarre…completely out to touch with previous 5 poems)

1. This is the only poem with a dedication : for Skye Baker
2. Poet describes:
3. cloud that is approaching and its shadow moves over
4. (…of course more grasses)
5. grasses, seedhead, tussock, milk-thistle and dry stalks of fennel.
6. a cloud of ink and charcoal.
7. The last words of the poem….baffling!

 

1. “Battening over the hospital and the children’s prison—numb,
2. ignorant rain falling (what is that?) from it without a
3. sound the way it falls through mirrors.” (Huh?)
4. “…She cuts the page in strips, pins them to a wall, would have them stained with hands”
5. Note:  I give up!
6. …this book better improve considerably in part 2
7. …or I’m tossing it in the bin!

 

Empirical VII:

Summary:  (off-the-wall attempt for a ‘sense of place’)

1. Poet describes:
2. storm water piped down a gully filled with weed tracks.
3. water flows to a standing pool
4. water is pumped up to the golf course
5. …that sometimes floods the creek
6. a factory is surrounded by a cyclone fence.
7. smoke from the furnaces moves upward
8. rains….a screen on an leafless evergreen shrub, furze (aka gorse)
9. I read that poetry is the best words in the best order.
10. Ms Gorton seems to just scatter words willy-nilly
11. …making no sense of place  at all!
12. Ms Gorton tries create her own inner land- and time-scapes… but THIS reader is left
13. unsatisfied….and now thirsty.
14. Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink!)
15. It just feels like prose with line-breaks added.

Furze (aka gorse)

 

Royal Park  (longest poem in part 1, huge disappointment)

Summary

1. This is a helicopter view of Royal Park’s history from 1835-1956.
2. Ms Gorton uses 95% text from various historical documents
3. mixed with 4% of words from the
4. previous Empirical meditations and
5. 1 % new thoughts captured in the last 100 words.
6. Snippets about  the original people
7. involved in the history of Royal Park
8. — descriptions of the map
9. — descriptions of a watercolour painting
10. An Escape from the First Gaol
11. … all these snippets/descriptions
12. do not make Royal Park a poem by any stretch of the imagination!

 

Watercolour painting: An Escape from the First Gaol  (Tullamareena burning prison)

 

Part 2:  Crystal Palace

Aphrodite of Melos (poem)

Summary

1. Ms Gorton has used information that can be
2. found on Wikipedia and filtered it through a poet’s eyes.
3. No harm in that. She mentions where and who found the statue etc.
4. The poet describes the statue “drapery falls from her thighs like folds in water” or “
5. …golden earrings in the shape of flowers…”.
6. Now I’m no poet….but these comparisons
7. sound like they are lacking in imagination.
8. The object most mentioned is the mirror…3 x in the poem.
9. I was not impressed with this poem, c’est la vie.

 

Aphrodite of Melos

 

1. Rimbaud’s Cities I, Imperial Panoramas
2. Summary:
3. This is nothing else but
4. Ms Gorton’s translation of Illuminations – 19 – Villes
5. L’acropole officielle by Rimbaud.
6. Rimbaud’s Cities II, Imperial Panoramas
7. Summary:  Again….just a transltion of Rimbaud’s poem.

 

Crystal Palace (poem)

Summary:

1. Ms Gorton lets her poetic mind roam while
2. contemplating the history of Crystal Palace.
3. The first half of the poem is a lyrical
4. description of the building and
5. a large part of the second half of the poem
6. …is a list of 14 bizarre images a reader might
7. see in the clouds that pass over the glass
8. windows of Crystal Palace.
9. Again….I am not impressed by this poem.
10. I cannot find many poetic features
11. that can highlight tone and mood
12. (e.g., repetition, rhyme, alliteration, metaphor).
13. It feels like a regurgitation of facts with a whiff of imagination.

 

Crystal Palace

 

Mirror, Palace (poem)

Summary:

1. Again a poem that is based on the writing of Coleridge:
2. Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream
3. Note: Ms Gorton uses documents, quotes a few lines then
4. gives her own interpretation of other unquoted lines….
5. Marco Polo wrote: ‘…which he gives to his hawks…
6. Ms Gorton wrote: “… carcasses for his gyrfalcons..”
7. Last line of the poem sums it up:
8. “I have annexed a fragment’ is a quote by Coleridge
9. …..and that
10. describes what Ms Gorton has done.
11. I’m starting to sound like a broken record:
12. Again….I am not impressed by this poem

 

Life Writing  (poem?  text?)
Of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

Summary:

1. This is a confused text that I had to skim
2. It was exhausting and after having read 95% of this book
3. I did not have the mental energy to read this carefully.
4. I stumbled on references to:
5. King Arthur and the Round Table ( How Morgan Le Fay Tried to Kill King Arthur ) “…Arthur had
6. gone to rest for he had fought a hard battle, and for three nights had slept but little,”
7. Extracts from the Excursion: [Mist Opening in the Hills]
8. By William Wordsworth “…The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
9. Was of a mighty city..”
10. …and many quotes from other writings that I had no desire to read.
11. Again…this  was a jumble of quotes, facts and God knows what else!
12. …not impressed at all, sorry.

Landscape With Magic Lantern Slides  (poem)

Summary:

1. The poet uses words that have appeared in
2. previous poems to give this poem a ‘bookend’ feeling:
3. factory, landscape, train lines various forms of grasses and shrubs, statues.
4. Ms Gorton quotes ‘You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways”
5. (note: quote De rerum natura On the Nature of Things.

 

Last Thoughts:

1. I am at the end of this book and glad I can say…
2. I did read EVERY word even when I felt
3. like throwing the book in the bin.
4. Ms Gorton is a very well-read scholar but is she a great poet?
5. Perhaps I have been spoiled after reading 64 poems by Les Murray.
6. The difference between Ms Gorton and Murray…is stiff and stark.
7. My advice? Read Les Murray…

 

#AusReadingMonth2020 Ruby Moonlight (poetry)

• Title: Ruby Moonlight
  
• Author: Ali Cobby Eckermann
  
• Genre: poetry
  
• Published: 2012
  
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly reading plan
• Bingo card: SA
  
• #AusReadingMonth2020 @Bronasbooks
• #AWW2020  @AustralianWomenWriters

 

Absolute gem !!    …64  pages, you can read it in 30 min, time well spent!

• WINNER – 2012 Indigenous Writing Fellowship. The black&write!
• Writing Fellowships are offered annually to two Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander writers
• WINNER – 2012 Deadly Award Outstanding Achievement in Literature
• WINNER – 2013 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and
• WINNER – 2013 Book of the Year Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary and History Awards

 

Introduction:

1. A verse novel that centers around the impact of colonization
2. in mid-north South Australia around 1880.
3. Ruby, refugee of a massacre, shelters in the woods where
4. she befriends an Irishman trapper.
5. The poems convey how fear of discovery is overcome
6. by the need for human contact, which, in a tense unraveling of events,
7. …is forcibly challenged by an Aboriginal lawman.
8. The natural world is richly observed and
9. Ruby’s courtship is measured by the turning of the seasons.

 

Conclusion:

1. This poem (novel in verse) is a short read
2. …but don’t confuse length and density.
3. Ruby Moonlight was a delight to read!
4. Ms Eckermann has used all her poetic skills that make a poem
5. that is a a joy to read out loud: sounds linked by
6. …alliteration, internal vowels and final consonants.
7. I read this poem to my cat…and he loved it!
8. The characters come to life in simple language
9. …and a love story you will not forget.
10. #MustRead

• Ruby Moonlight  (the lubra, aboriginal woman)
• Miner Jack
• Spear maker
• The old dancer and two warriors
• The mob
• Kuman
• Man with no music

 

 

 

 

#Poetry Penelope Layland

• Title: Things I Thought To Tell You Since I Saw You Last
  
• Author: Penelope Layland
  
• Genre: poetry
  
• Published: 2018
  
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly reading plan
• Bingo card: ACT
  
• #AusReadingMonth2020 @Bronasbooks
• #AWW2020  @AustralianWomenWriters
• Trivia: Winner  2019 ACT  Book of the Year 
• Trivia: 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry – shortlist

 

• NOTE:  After having read all the poems
• I finally discovered the impact of the title.
• Ms Layland’s skill in exploring mourning, grief and loss is captured in the
• Things I Thought To Tell You Since I Saw You Last
• #Bravo to a great poet!

 

Introduction:

1. This book contains 64 short poems…very readable!
2. The poet gives us poems dealing with:
3. quizzing memory
4. understanding the concept of time
5. deep human connections
6. exploring mourning and loss

 

Future anterior – very good, cleverly done!

1. I start by investigating the title…future anterior.
2. …an action/event that will be completed ind the future.
3. Ms Layland cleverly writes a poem about trees
4. …mentioning the Huon (Pine)
5. If you read about the tree that only is found in Tasmania
6. before you read the poem  you will discover
7. the poet’s skill  jusing the Huon as as an example of ‘future anterior’!
8. Huon Pine….the oldest tree in the world!

 

In Miss Havisham’s Garden – …description of garden after owner is gone…

Calendar 

1. Very good!
2. things that must be done after death of loved one,
3. poem will linger in my mind.

 

A modern offer

1. I found this a strange title. What does ‘modern’ mean?
2. occuring in the present
3. recently developed style
4. characteristic to the present-day
5. ahead of its times
6. This was a difficult poem to understand.
7. The poet speaks of a ‘harp-and-cord version’
8. …then compares it to  a ‘contemporary rendering’ (version)
9. Words like corporeality, merging of essences, eternal life
10. …made me think Ms Layland was making a case to accept a
11. ‘Modern offer’ (cremation) instead of a burial death (….harp-and-cord version).
12. I would love to hear if somebody had any thoughts on this poem
13. …it was a hard nut to crack!

 

Rising of the Lights (London 1665)

1. It took time to figure out the layout…
2. …poem is just an summation of dreaded  historic diseases.
3. Depressing….not lyrical content at all!
4. Now, what happened in London in 1665?
5. The Great Plague, lasting from 1665 to 1666,
6. was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England.
7. Structure: shape and visual rhythm is the first thing I noticed.
8. Title: The disease “Rising of the Lights” was a standard entry on
9. bills of mortality  in the 17th century.
10. Lights is an old name for lungs.
11. The poem is 6 stanzas with 1 or 4 word sentences.
12. This has a staccato effect to impress on the reader
13. a list of  diseases that competed with the Bubonic Plague!

 

Aubade

1. Aubade, a poem or song evoking the daybreak, greeting the dawn.
2. This is a 10 lines poem that radiates beauty!
3. Dawn ” thread of incadescence”
4. …that “ruptures into morning”.
5. I watch with a ‘indrawn breath’.
6. This is exactly what happened when
7. I watched many sunrises this summer during a pandemic lockdown!!
8. Leeuwarden, The Netherlands,  July 02 2020

Several more poems….quickscan:

1. Irregular –  average...poem of 10 lines….no impact on me
2. One Tree Hill – average...poem of 13 lines….no impact on me
3. By Request – average...poem of 12 lines….refers to flowers at a funeral, prefer poppies.
4. Breath – Relief – stunning…..poem of loss and how a breath, sigh, relief can alleviate the grief.
5. Pearl –  Ms Layland says it is NOT  love poem, but I disagree.  Absolutely beautiful….
6. Cowries – ….the sea shells of New South Wales. Description of shell: “an almond unzipped”.

 

Cold zeal (strong feeling of eagerness)

1. This is a poem about aging.
2. We read “eyesight fails“
3. ….the “compass of the immediate world shrinks.”
4. Ms Lalyland with her power of observation
5. ….reminds us of the beauty that is there to see:
6. — ice etchings on a fence
7. — oily swirl  on a river’s current
8. — brief looks of interest from strangers
9. — complexities of  mist.
10. This is one of the poems that will linger in my mind, exquisite.

Last Thoughts:

1. Poems of loss, grief just go straight through my heart.
2. pg 21 “Pre-Ceremonial“,  pg 24 “This Loss….
3. Grief never leaves you…it alters you.
4. Ms Layland has given me some excellent poems to read
5. and expresses her grief and mourning in very short 1-page poems.
6. How does she  compress so much emotion in 10 – 20 lines?
7. Yet, these poems do not leave you downtrodden
8. …but strangely lift one’s spirits up.
9. Grief is part of life.
10. I cannot discover is she has lost a husband, child or parents
11. …but  no one can write about loss and grief as she does
12. …without out experiencing it.
13. Please, if you never read poetry
14. …give this 68 page book a chance.
15. It will alter you.
16. With poetry…..you don’t have to go through a windshield to
17. ...realize that life is precious.
18. Poetry keeps tapping you on the shoulder with that same message.
19. #MustRead….and #MustRe-Read

#AusReadingMonth2020 Bella Li

• Title: Argosy
• Author: Bella Li
  
• Genre: prose poems, collages, images
  
• Published: 2017
• Bingo card:  VIC
  
• #AusReadingMonth2020   @bronasbooks
  
• #AWW2020  @AustralianWomenWriters
• Trivia:  The book models itself from Max Ernst’s collage novels
• — Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage
• — La femme 100 têtes
• Trivia: Winner Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2018
  
• Trivia: Winner Kenneth Slessor Prize 2018 (New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award)

 

Conclusion:

1. I had high hopes for this book
2. …but after reading it I am convinced
3. I have a lot to learn about poetry.
4. The book contains 14 small chapters:
5. 7 chapters  = collage images;   7 chapters = text.
6. Collage/images:
7. Ms Li used historical illustrations made by French explorers.
8. and added some of her own imaginative visuals including
9. …position seashells, butterflies, and animals atop
10. 18th and 19th C explorer sketches from La Pèrouse.
11. Ms Li  places her prose poem sequences
12. in between the image sections
13. …that play with quiet and fantastical visual scenes

 

1. Text:  prose poetry , ‘vers libre’ imitating the style Rimbaud uses.
2. It is ESSENTIAL TO KNOW... the back round information Li uses as
3. as basis for part 1 of the book: “La Pérouse, une semane de disparitions”
4. Chapters Les Rêves (7 stanzas) and Les Incendies (7 stanzas).

• On March 10, 1788, the French explorer
• Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse departed  (wikipedia info)
  
• the penal colony of Sydney, having spent six weeks stocking up on supplies.
• Now it was time to resume his exploration of the Pacific.
• He sailed north out of the harbour, bound for
• New Caledonia and the Solomons, due to return home the following year.
• He was never seen again.

 

Ms Li’s objective:   Part 1

1. Use prose poetry to compose a vision of the explorer’s demise.
2. Voice to La Pérouse’s thoughts and observations.
3. Describe what he felt/seen shipwrecked on Vanikoro, an atoll of the Solomon Islands

 

My experience:

1. I read part 1 with NO knowledge of Ms Li’s  narrative objective.
2. My note in the book:  “I can’t  make heads of tails of this!”
3. After I did discover what I was missing
4. ...the poems made more sense.
5. So I hope this helps you if you want to read Argosy.

 

Ms Li’s objective:  Part 2  (title: The Hundred Headless Woman)

1. …female character sketches:
2. Isodora: A Western: (ref – dancer Isadora Duncan and ref – Cormac McCarthy
3. io sono l’amore: (ref: film maker Luca Guadagnino)
4. The Novelist Elena Ferrante (ref: to Ischia, place used in EF’s novels)
5. The Memory Machine Elena Obieta (ref: SF writer Ricardo Piglia and his fictional character Elena Obieta)
6. The poem 아가씨 (ref: film The Handmaiden, 2016)…little story of Tamako
   

 

My experience:

1. Without some back round information
2. …I was lost while reading part 2.
3. Ms Li DID PROVIDE NOTES  on page 168…
4. I should have read them BEFORE reading the book!!
5. I was lost during the first reading of this book
6. ….but it was my own fault!
7. After re-reading the entire book
8. I now realize why  Ms Bella Li
9. has been awarded many literary awards
10. .…she pushes the boundaries of poetry!
11. This book requires a deep engagement with the text
12. …in order to make meaning from it.
13. #GoodRead  for poetry buffs….

#Poetry Nganajungu Yagu

• Title: Nganajungu Yagu
• Author: Charmaine Papertalk Green
• Genre: poems, letters
  
• Bingo card:  WA
• #AusReadingMonth2020   @Bronasbooks
  
• #AWW2020  @AustralianWomenWriters
• Trivia: Winner 2020 The Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal
  
• Trivia: Winner 2020 Victorian Premier’s Awards
• Trivia:  Shortlist 2020 Queensland Literary Awards

 

Conclusion:

1. This book took me to a place that felt so safe.
2. It took me back to my mother….
3. …and how it felt leaving her at 20 years old to start my life
4. …in a new country.
5. Ms Green also left her family, her mother to attend boarding school.
6. It brought back the feeling guilt
7. …which I still carry not being with her in her last years.
8. It reminded me that my mother  knew I had to lead my own life
9. …and pushed me to a new future
10. …and I am grateful she did.

1. We kept in contact through letters (pre-internet/email).
2. …and one or two international phone calls ( 1970s = expensive!!)
3. I feel so lucky to have those letters.
4. …just as Charmaine Papertalk Green explains
5. in her book Nganajungu Yagu ( My Mother)
6. …how she cherishes her letters
7. …and save them in her RJS (suitcase).
   

 

1. Ms Papertalk Green reached out to me
2. …and we shared the same thoughts.
3. I hold a letter with my mothers handwriting and think…
4. She wrote these words, sentences
5. and sealed it always with the words
6. …Love and kisses, Mother.

 

1. My mother gave me the courage to persevere
2. through the first 10 years in a new country
3. …with a new language to learn.
4. I endured and sat on the tip of each day
5. … watching the hours tick over the west
6. …and come up in the east
7. …and eventually the homesickness did subside.

 

1. Sadly my mother has passed away….
2. …but  I still hold her letters and talk to her.
3. I feel just like Charmine Papertalk Green
   …so close yet so far away.
4. #MustRead
5. Score: A+++++++

 

#Essays The Fire This Time

• Editor: Jesmyn Ward  (1977)
  
• Title:  The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
  
• Published: 2016
  
• List of Challenges 2020
• Monthly reading plan
• My list of books about black lives

 

• Trivia: The acclaimed novelist Jesmyn Ward
• lost her beloved husband
• as COVID-19 swept across the country.
• She writes through their story, and her grief.
  
• I just had to add her essay for you to read.
• ESSAY:
• On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic

 

Introduction: Jesmyn Ward

1. Ms Ward tells us James Baldwin inspired her as a wise father.
2. His essay Fire Next Time is the basis of the title of this book.
3. Baldwin was the widest read African American writer of his time.
4. Baldwin’s  essay The Fire Next Time sold more than a million copies in 1963.
5. The staying power of this essay, even after 57 years
6. ….is his writing style.
7. He personalized the large conflicts which made it a fascinating read.
8. Not preachy…but straight from the heart!
9. If you haven’t read this essay, please do.
10. ….I’m sure you will not forget it.

 

Kima Jones (1982)

1. Homegoing, AD  (poem, prose)
2. Title is taken from an old African-American belief that
3. death allowed an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to Africa.
4. I loved the humorous observation  that
5. …indicates
6. “Here’s the down south story we didn’t tell you…”
7. “When did everybody stop eating pork
8. “…when all women become Nefertiti bangles and headwraps
9. …and all us named like Muslims.”

 

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah (1982)

1. Essay The Weight  is  about James Baldwin.
2. Ghansah writes of her decision to visit James Baldwin’s
3. …former home in the south of France.
4. She is one of the most brilliant essayists writing in America today.
5. Take the time to READ her Pulitzer Prize winning essay for feature writing:
6. The Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof

 

Wendy S. Walters (??)

1. Lonely in America (essay)
2. Ms Walters remarks on how little she considers the reality of slavery.
3. Her avoidance, in fact, comes from denial of slavery’s ugly truths
4. …and its existence throughout America,
5. Ms Walters ends the essay with her investigation of an African
6. burial ground recently found in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
7. There is a sharp sting in her words….

 

Isabel Wilkerson (1961)

1. Where Do We Go From Here?
2. This is a very short piece of prose…not even an essay.
3. Wilkerson describes the “continuing feedback loop”
4. ….that sees progress for civil rights, followed by
5. …a great downtrend, and repetition of these trends.
6. It feels like no matter where African Americans live….
7. geography could not save them.

 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers  (1967)

1. The Dear Pledges of Our Love: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley’s Husband
2. This essay describes Ms Jeffers research.

 

Daniel José Older

1. This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution  (letter form)
   
2. …this is Older’s letter to his wife (Natassian) and future child.
3. Natassian wants Older to explain to their unborn children why he writes

 

Natasha Trethewey 

1. Theories of Time and Space 
2. The speaker begins with the expression, “You can get there from here”
3. but warns that the journey will always take the reader to unfamiliar places.
4. This idiom is  used by persons being asked for directions
5. …to a location that cannot  be accessed without complicated directions.

 

Edwidge Danticat

1. Message to my Daughters
2. Edwidge Danticat’s essay begins with her trip to Haiti.
3. Danticat and her friends survey the dusty refugee camps.
4. She reconsiders this idea of refugee
5. …in light of a housing project in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
6. That residence and  the school she attended,
7. …operated like a refugee camp by treating people as temporary.

 

Garnette Cadogan

1. Black and Blue
2. This was so interesting!
3. As a preteen, Cadogan  developed his after-dark walking habit
4. and sometimes stayed out until sunrise, to his mother’s dismay.
5. He describes walks in his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica
6. …his college town on New Orleans.

 

Emily Roboteau

1. Know Your Rights –  essay on urban murals
2. After the Charleston shooting in 2015 Ms Roboteau
3. ...takes her children to see the recently reopened
4. …High Bridge in New York City.
5. The bridge connects the Bronx with Harlem
6. …and was closed for over forty years.
7. She tell her kids to notice and enjoy the
8. ….world around them when they leave home.

 

Kiese Laymon

1. Da art of Storytellin‘
2. Laymon has one of the best ‘hooks’ in all these essays:
3. Kiese Laymon’s essay begins by describing Catherine, his grandmother,
4. enacting her morning routine before
5. …working as a “buttonhole slicer at a chicken plant”.
6. Laymon wants to find his ‘voice’ in his writing.

 

Mitchell S. Jackson

1. Composite Pops
2. This hits the reader ‘right between the eyes’.
3. Jackson’s essay begins by asking how boys without fathers
4. …spell the word father.

 

Clint Smith (1988)

1. Queries of Unrest
2. Picture this…I’m walking in the morning sun
3. …taking photos and minding my own business.
4. When this one sentence stopped me in my tracks:
5. “Maybe that’s because when I was a kid
6. a white boy told me I was marginalized
7. and all I could think of was the edge of a sheet of paper
8. …how empty it is –“
9. Wow, what an observation…what a gut punch.
10. I immediately looked up ‘Clint Smith’ and Audible.com
11. I had book credits to burn.
12. His collection of poems “Counting Descent” is just 1 hr 2 min.
13. But once I heard his voice….so intense.
14. I knew I had to have this book and take Clint with me on my walks.

 

Kevin Young

1. Blacker Than Thou about Rachel Dolezal‘s blackface.
2. …this is a hilarious essay

 

Conclusion:

1. This book is an excellent introduction to so many
2. young African American writers 
3. writing themselves into the world and
4. into the future and being committed to a future.

 

1. Ms Ward explains why she edited this book.
2. Highlights a few of the selections and
3. ….hopes with her book
4. “…a reader might see those like me anew.”
5. Ms Ward:
6. “All these essays give me hope. I believe there is power in words. .
7. Maybe someone who didn’t perceive
8. ….us as human will think differently after reading this book.”

 

Last Thoughts:

1. I listened to the audio book
2. but felt I was missing so much
3. …of these excellent essays.
4. I ordered the Kindle book….and that is the best way
5. ….to savour these  talented writers.
6. #MustRead….you won’t regret it!