I will start with a pertinent quote
from Yeats: Out of the quarrel with
ourselves, we make rhetoric, but poetry is born of the quarrel with ourselves.
Welcome to this book launch of
CONSTELLATIONS by Deanne Leber – a very important book in the contemporary west
coast literary scene of Australia. This poetry community has a long history
that is described and illustrated by various anthologies still available today,
the latest being John Kinsella’s Fremantle
Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry. But there’s no Deanne Lieber included
… and no L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poetry. I guarantee there will be in the next
anthology: There will be quotes from this book and its influences. It is a
breath of fresh air in the local poetry scene – it progresses both in its
composition and its writing.
I mention composition because this is
very physical writerature – an intellectual architecture, still tactile but
with deep theory behind it. The basic element is the words but grouped together
they associate, contradict, waylay connotations, expose and whistle their own
tunes. They are all from Deanne’s lexicon of all her life until now. The form
is realized by human techniques but the highlight of the form is the reading of
the constellations by the writer. The ‘Author’ may be dead, as Roland Barthes
wrote, but the Reader is ever more important in the CONSTELLATIONS.
As reader and writer, Deanne Leber is
influenced fundamentally by Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian – but you can trace
her creative impulses back to the earliest known drawing by human hand, five
strokes of clay in a South African cave. The nearest link to Deanne’s prose
poems would be Ania Walwicz in Australian poetry. And maybe Michelle Leggett in
NZ.
How to read CONSTELLATIONS is a very
personal thing. Each reader experiences a different universe. There are
constellations illustrated, one at a time – followed by a prose poem of one
page with a different kaleidoscopic theme each time, then an emergent poem on
an entirely different theme with its own page … and finally the verbal bones of
the theme positioned on the page as dictated to by the apexes of that
individual Constellation. The obvious way to read them is one constellation at
a time, but I read some prose poems one day and marveled over the emergent
poems on another. The spiky visual poems I read as sculptures. You can do what
you like, read it in large gulps or small breaks but it will last you a long time
to exhaust its multi-dimensional layers.
As Lyn Hejinian says, The process is more composition than
writing. But let’s zero in on the writing, the words Deanne chose at one
stage or another. Here’s a couple of quotes from her prose poems: notice how
age-old images come to life by juxtaposition -
Deanne Leber quote: A
plastic rose and a feather duster caressed. A dirty knee’d angel with the words
of a poet stuck in throat. Hum of song stuck in note. Stars sucking tongue.
Undone. Crawling to begin again.
DL quote: Skin closes moments made new
by colour. Longing to be your slow sad ballerina. Dancing my heel got caught in
the gutter. Threaded to your skin to your heart. When writing replaces words
you can’t say.
DL: Waiting for a tongue to begin.
Love hearts and wings against skin. He etched feathers on walls as the train
linked each track to a new word. Breaking their
umbilical shells. Born into shapes caressed with pen.
I love ‘words breaking their umbilical shells.’
I haven’t finished CONSTELLATIONS yet
– I’ve only had the text a week - and I will never exhaust this book. It’ll be
like Finnegan’s Wake for me, an
endless delight. Buy it now before they run out.
-
Andrew Burke (MA, PhD)
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