Review of smoke encrypted whispers by Sam Wagan Watson (St Lucia: UQP, 2004).
I first heard Sam Wagan Watson read at the Subverse Poetry Festival in Brisbane in the late 1990s. I thought his work was interesting but didn’t manage to get hold of it in print. I chanced upon him this year at a poetry reading in Wagga Wagga, while I was on the road with Five Islands Press. I was really pleased to be able to get hold of a copy of his collected work, smoke encrypted whispers put out by the University of Queensland Press.
smoke encrypted whispers includes of muse, meandering and midnight (2000), which won the David Unaipon award, boondall wetlands (2000) (which I assume is excerpted from Sam’s website), hotel bone (2001), itinerant blues(2002), and smoke encrypted whispers (2004), which showcases some of his most recent work.
Sam’s work can best be described as poetry that takes an urban aboriginal perspective on the world. It’s a young perspective as well — it’s poetry that has the energy and sense of adventure that belongs to a young man. The one thing missing from that formula is the in-your-face anger. This really surprised me at first, but it becomes one of the real strengths of Sam’s work: anger is there, but it is not the dominant emotion, and when it appears, it is tempered. This ability to temper anger and other emotions (love, regret, lust, fear), to hold these things back, to examine these emotions, and to place them in their context is what produces Sam’s art, his poetry.
One of the things I enjoy most about a chronologically arranged collection is the opportunity one gets to trace a poet’s development over time. of muse, meandering and midnight is typical of a poet’s first collection — it’s readable with flashes of talent (I say this with my own first collection in mind!). Brisbane is there, so is love, loss, irony, and sarcasm. The poetry materializes as free verse, with considerable experimentation with line-length, but no other forays into formality. The poetry is strained in places where Sam is trying too hard to be A POET, and there is a sense of two voices in struggle (a voice attempting some form of poetic diction, and a more laconic, casual voice), but when Sam relaxes, the poetry comes, in poems like “waiting for the good man” and “cheap white-goods at the dreamtime sale”.
boondall wetlands continues in the same register, but something starts happening with hotel bone: “the street resembles a neck / from a wayward guitar / with Hotel Bone sitting idle on a vein, / wedged between two frets / where the bad tunes can reach her”, but the tunes are good, something’s starting to sing. That voice keeps emerging through itinerant blues, there are some really good poems here, I particularly liked “jaded olympic moments” and “last exit to brisbane … ”. The last poem, “hollow squall” comes like an epiphany: Sam moves out of free verse into the prose poem and it’s as if his voice finally finds its perfect form: “Twilight is for the communion of soil and water. For a brief moment the haemorraghing skin of the bay shares no separation with the failing land.” This poem about love and loss ends in a one line haiku, a coda: “My heavy heart beats for you; a black rock at the bottom of the sea.”
It is to Sam’s credit as a poet that he recognises this moment of epiphany in his own work. The last series in the book, smoke encrypted whispers, takes the prose-poem-with-haiku-coda and runs with it. The poetry is really good. I can’t fault it at all, it is strong poem after strong poem, and suddenly it’s all there, the things that matter to this poet: Brisbane – cityscape and landscape; the ghosts of memory – growing up black in Bjelke-Pertersen land; the ghosts of history – ancestral spirits, the history of Boundary St; being a poet; family – Mum, Dad, Grandpop, the ex-wife, the son; these things have been there before, but they crystallize in this series of poems. An excerpt to end on:
“I was born in Tigerland, on the south-side of Brisbane. Saturday morning smelt of hardware compost and the static of horse racing. … Under the orange and black stripes of sunset, bouncing off Mt Gravatt, were the colours on the jersey of Easts Leagues Club. That growling big-cat patch that really meant something to us all. … Those colours paved our streets. And from those streets, I was inspired by my first ghosts as they rose from the bitumen like O-rings of smoke.” (“tigerland”)
(PS. If you’ve ever rehearsed the not-ready-to-publish argument in your head and have wondered why we should publish emerging poets, read this book, it will tell you why itself).
Miriam Wei Wei Lo
current title Against Certain Capture, New Poets 10
Five Islands Press, ISBN 1 74128 055 9
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