poets correspond: review of ‘reliefs’ with Andy jackson
Dear Andy,
A poet mate tells me that when he started writing, all he wanted to be was a romantic poet. The kind who lulls on about sunshine and first kisses. Those expansions and contractions of the heart.
When he talks about this, he sighs. Tells me that Australian poetry never had much space for work like this. That if he was this sort of poet, he’d never get published. Despite writing lines that could make a sailor cry freshwater tears, I think he’s right. The more popular poetry journals in Australia, largely overlook work that might be considered sentimental, coy, confessional or, perhaps, overtly lyrical. Serious poets, it seems, can’t talk about love in its myriad forms unless the frame of reference is clearly reaching for something else. The primary aesthetic simply cannot be love. I get there are different traditions meeting, but the message is fairly clear: sentimental poems are just too basic. Families aren’t for poetry. Love, and its iterations, are for losers. There’s no art here, man.
Of course, there are exceptions, and big ones: Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs has so many startling and sentimental movements. So does Sarah Holland Batt’s Stella Prize-winning collection, The Jaguar, as well as Gavin Yuan Gao’s At the Altar of Touch (a book, incidentally, that you chose as the most recent winner of the Prime Minister’s Award, Andy!). In this sense, maybe UQP is where commercial poetry (whatever that means) and ‘art poetry’ (again, whatever that means) meet and make sense. There are few poetry publishers that are making us both think and feel, at the same time, and with such intensity.
To allow myself that sentimentality, Reliefs by Jarad Bruinstroop, is, well, a relief. It continues UQP’s tradition. As a whole, it’s a shapeshifting collection, weaving together poems about the Greek-like beauty, tragedy and terror of 3AM men at the Sportsman’s Hotel; a series of art-history and ekphrastic pieces that make the works they respond to—which, in some cases, are almost a century old—feel as contemporary as yesterday; a single couplet poem that ruptures any notions that the Marriage Equality Survey produced winners; poems about climate collapse where once in a century becomes an unutterable joke; lexicon-thick poems of picking up a stick of weed, deriding Astro Boy’s dad for not getting the youth; and cutting prose poems about the commodification and technocratic obfuscation of mental health services in Australia.
But, for me, where Jarad does his best work is in the sentimental. He’s slacking off the leather jacket and baring it all. There’s nothing to prove except the beauty of a good poem. In this sense, the collection reminds me so acutely of Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things, a collection that moved me to tears time and time again.
Reliefs opens with the poem ‘Red Cross’, in which Bruinstroop writes about going to give blood with his father and having to lie, twice, in order to conceal his queerness. The poem closes
Red eyed in the waiting room, I lied again:
I guess I’m more scared of needles than I thought.
And my father took me, his blood, in his arms.
On each page you can feel that blood. This collection was like holding a warm body close.
Tim.
Dear Tim,
I think you’re right. Australian poetry journals—or even, Australian poetry in general—has an intensely ambivalent relationship with emotion lyrically and nakedly expressed. Some journals more than others, of course. Not naming names. That’s not (entirely) the point of this conversation, of course. But it’s definitely revealing how sentiment can be embarrassing. I wonder if part of that is due to a version of masculinity that has been dominant for so long, and an aesthetics that valorises intellect, where intellect is considered to be the opposite of emotion, or at least a kind of containing foil for it. Is that what you mean by saying that UQP books so often get us to ‘think and feel at the same time, and with such intensity’? Maybe that’s what the best poetry does—remind us that there’s no thinking without emotion, and vice versa.
Bruinstroop’s Reliefs is indeed a relief from that masculine straightjacket, in many ways (deliberate pun with ‘straight’, by the way). In these poems, a man can weep, admit to pain, be conflicted and flawed, but above all desire. The conflicted impulse to secrecy is examined, in all its violence and pathos. I’m thinking of that piercingly illuminating moment in ‘The Sportsman’s Hotel, 3AM’: ‘To be a man / is to scrutinise / all men. // And then lie about it’.
The poems arrive at their insights with such brevity, though. Not because of reticence, but through a trust in the potency of implication. So many poems are short here—nine or ten lines, even down to two. It’s a skill I certainly don’t have. Bruinstroop, it seems to me, has a real flair in focusing on a particular event in such immersive detail, and in a condensed frame, that the event (paradoxically) expands, beginning to suggest other events, broader implications.
‘The Crew of the Zeewijk, 1727’ concerns an historical event, but could also be an allegory. It reads, in its entirety:
Already shipwrecked, they held a trial:
found two boys guilty of touching.
They must be left, the crew decided,
on separate islands without food or water.
Without food or water because they had sinned.
Separate islands in case they sinned again.
I was also fascinated, and moved, to see the book conclude with the lyric essay (or is it a long prose poem?) ‘Peace Body Pain Body’. The shift to prose only reinforces the meticulous care with which the other short poems are constructed. It’s a brilliant, aching poem/essay/piece that weaves together philosophical, linguistic and phenomenological aspects of chronic pain. At one point, a government psychiatrist says ‘we don’t want you ending up on the scrap heap of life.’ Bruinstroop imagines it, ‘A towering pile of writhing limbs, defunct bodies. Who ends up there? Who decides?’.
Reliefs begins and ends with the body, vulnerable, wanting. This, to me, is part of what’s happening in Australian poetry at the moment, the return of embodiment, in all its woundedness and beauty, its otherness and its insights. Which is not disconnected from the multiple crises of our time; quite the contrary.
As a debut collection, it’s breathtaking, and rewards re-reading. Which says something about UQP, yes, but particularly about the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, which has introduced so many impressive new poets to the world (including Gavin Yuan Gao, whose At the Altar of Touch was, yes, chosen by me—as well as Judith Beveridge and Jazz Money, I have to say—as the winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry).
There’s a lot to talk about in terms of homophobia, masculinity and gender, overall in the collection, but also in poems such as ‘Silent Film’, ‘Yes I am still watching’, ‘The Closet’ and ‘Girl with Dog’. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the ekphrastic poems, which feel central to the collection overall. What is it about the impulse to reflect on—actually to re-inhabit—visual art? Sometimes I feel like ekphrastic poems read as tributes to the artwork. Here, there seems to be a lot more at stake.
Andy.
Hi Andy,
Your note on the imposed dichotomy of masculinities—a perhaps almost Cartesian binary between emotion and intellect where masculinity posits intellect must ‘win’ over, or control, the apparent irrationality of emotion—has got me thinking of what bell hooks called ‘psychic self-mutilation’ and ‘spiritual murder’. In The Will to Change, she wrote about the active severing of self from community and self from self, at which point men struggle to identify their emotions, let alone articulate them. American psychologist Terrence Real positioned this as a sort of abstracting and commodification of men’s bodies by men—a disembodying, per se, in which the core tenement of hegemonic masculinities is a ‘power over rather than power with’ (in this case, even a power over the self).
No doubt poetry can easily bolster this abstraction (and has, time and again), reinforce this ‘power over’, particularly in light of the brevity and clarity in which Bruinstroop delivers his insights. And yet, despite the overtly masculinised tone, the economy of words and the concentration of syntax, Reliefs never slips into an authorial voice, perhaps saved from this fate, by, as you note, the myriad implications of these small (and yet, contradictorily, huge) windows into life. The poems are forever reaching, rather than stuck in a place of knowing. There’s a threading here, a deep trust in the reader to see beyond the page, so perfectly captured in the poem ‘First Road Trip’, where Bruinstroop writes about watching a John Wayne Film at an open-air cinema:
The old add slides flick /
Light on and off your face. Known. Strange.
Known. Strange. Above us stars and galaxies scatter
like bushfire ash.
This poem, might, in its simplest terms, be described as an eco-poem (or climate poem), but it is so much more than that. The flickering of the light, embodied in the use of fragmented sentence, elicits the imposition of a caricature masculinity pre-show (in this case, John Wayne)—a feeling of both intimacy and distance, with self and the other. This is, again, embodied when Bruinstroop compares scattered galaxies with ash, and eventually, the container wall that’s 12-feet taller than the screen, as a wave that might destroy them. This isn’t viewership, but rather a lived-in uncertainty. A want to seek out the connection between moments—an impulse towards desire not in a romantic sense, but rather in the understanding of self as inherently inter-related (what hooks and Real, respectively, called, a ‘feminist masculinity’ and ‘partnership model’) No image is unstuck from the image before it. The ‘threat’ (perhaps the wrong word) of this poem is both patriarchal and climatic, but it’s also just being human in which each moment might suddenly untether itself from the moment before it. But in this untethering, there is a coming together: in this poem, as a shift from the ‘you’ to the ‘we’.
Perhaps this is what you mean, Andy, when you write about the impulse to reinhabit in the ekphrastic poems. There’s an overall coming together in these poems: be that the incorporation of pain into the body’s scheme in the final prose poem, a father gripping his son in the opening poem, or survival as a collective instinct that transcends beyond the merely human in ‘First Road Trip’. In the case of the ekphrastic series, even Francis Bacon and David Hockney meet in an unhappiness that is unspecified for different reasons. Maybe, in the simplest terms, these ekphrastic poems are just about points of contact, points of relief—the emergency, necessity and beauty of these points for the poet, the artist and the human broadly. This inhabiting speaks to how art is actually experiences (or, at least, perhaps how it should be). In ‘Pool Sweet I’, to ‘get into a pool / is to put your faith / in the water’. In section II, ‘you can always paint him in again’. In III:
a gilt dragonfly
hovers, uncertain,
as if sensing that the water
will defy depiction in a painting
or a poem
There’s an agency and sense of trust in this connection: a moment of decision that chooses love, that chooses entanglement, that, ironically, chooses the living, the moment, over the abstraction.
Tim.
Tim, what you say about Reliefs as being a poetics of connection and entanglement, I’d sensed that when I read it, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So thanks. I’m always slightly ambivalent about poems that explicitly state their own inadequacy, like that ending in ‘Pool Sweet’ you’ve quoted (though I’ll admit it, I write those kinds of lines myself). Only because it seems like such a contradiction, even pre-emptively self-defeating. But of course it’s deeply true. Poems have their most potent effects through their seeming failure, not by pretending, but through exposure. And it’s why these poems are breathtaking and wise, unfurling more with re-reading.
Which reminds me, I looked up ‘reliefs’ in the context of visual art. They’re wall sculptures essentially, something ostensibly flat yet carved so as to emerge out towards the viewer. Two-dimensional becomes three-dimensional. Which makes me think of the poem ‘Doubt’:
Love here
is the word
for welding
frayed and pitted
viscera to hope.
It was a doomed
affair but only new
prayers in old mouths
exercise the gums.
Andy.
Andy, I think I’m more than ambivalent when it comes to self-referential poems that speak to the inadequacies of poetry as a form—I’m typically sceptical (though, admittedly, I write these poems as well). Often, I feel, like this movement feels like a cheap trick that obfuscates a lack of intent and meaning, as in the meaning is retconned by signalling the construct. In this case, however, Bruinstroop’s conceit refracts the inadequacies not only of the form, but of the connection more broadly. To me, it’s not a failing of the form explicitly, but a failing of our own pretentions and apprehensions when it comes to being with the poem. As you write, failure and exposure. It is *us* who is failing to connect, the poem as a by-product; we, like the dragonfly, imagine the poem (or art piece) as two-dimensional. With or without the poem, we create the distance.
Perhaps this speaks to reliefs as a form: the moving from the two-dimenional to three. If we find the right angle, there is a point in which the art is aching to be touched—not a ‘product’ of the world, but, as we’ve spoken about, entangled in it. In ‘The Opposite of an Avalanche’, Bruinstoop wraps equally bucolic and haunting moments—high altitude in a hot air balloon, equalising a scuba tank deep under water and walking along a trainline as a fox follows—with the white walls of a waiting room. These moments are both images gathered in a glossy magazine as well as flashbacks intimately tied to the waiting (to be seen? to be told? who knows…). The speaker closes the poem insisting, ‘I am the opposite of an avalanche’, despite how the poem elicits the inseparability of the abstract from the object/subject, of the disembodied from the embodied. Again, that exposure and failure. There is no denying how entangled we are—and yet, how often we deny this entanglement.
Tim.
Let’s keep reminding ourselves of it. Connection, I mean. And exposure. And failure. I like how this book has made us vociferous and expansive. It’s hard not to keep going. To steal some lines from Bruinstoop, ‘I ought to stop / … but I’m a sucker / for something based // on my viewing history’.
I’m looking forward to there being more books like this, that illuminate the blind-spots and shadows of masculinity. And to the next book we end up corresponding over.
Andy.
Andy Jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and a Patron of Writers Victoria. He was the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow, and has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal. Andy’s latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, editor and educator. In 2022, he won the Dorothy Porter Poetry Award, and 2023 he was shortlisted for the David Harold Tribe Poetry Award. He has been the recipient of a Next Chapter Fellowship, Writing Space Fellowship and numerous residencies and grants. A Neurodivergent dog parent, Tim is the verse editor for The Creative Hub of Extinction Rebellion and the director of Curate||Poetry.
Relationship note: In late 2020, Andy was Tim’s tutor in Poetry and Performance at RMIT. Tim has recently taken over this role, after Andy was offered a full-time position at The University of Melbourne.
Aftermath
Ray puts his mouth up to the gap between the window and the car door-frame. Still, everything smells of burning. Smoky air grazes his throat, punches his lungs. His head spins and he slumps back into the driver’s seat. No matter what he does, he can’t stop his hands from shaking. I could go out, he thinks, find her.
He looks at the gap again with disbelief. The windscreen, a Rorschach of leaves, of singed tin and copper and black land. The ash spread out like melting snow. No hope.
From the west, a lone clay road snakes through the flat valley, enters town, passes the red pub, and drops into the gully before cutting over the dry riverbed and almost disappearing north. Almost. There are cuts in the film where trees should be, like someone’s gone at flesh with a Stanley knife.
Ray closes his eyes, trying not to think of all that death. All he can see is her. Her pitched ears and underbite. Her pink tongue slipping out between her upside-down fangs. Her eyes, giant black pools in a cave where a half-moon’s reflection gleams off the water. Her wrinkled jowls, the pink tabs behind her whiskers, her pressed nose. Everyone called her ugly. Not him. She was the most beautiful girl in the world.
He rubs his eyes, swallows glass. Across the road, four men in dirty yellow jumpsuits are hosing down the pub. Oily rainbows sweat off the maroon facade and pool at the base of stained tree trunks used as verandah posts. Ray licks his lips, sniffs. He’d sink his face into one of those pools, drink until his stomach … Those fucking cunts.
Again, he reaches for the window crank, rattles it, trying to make it budge. No dice. The gap between the frame and window is barely ten centimetres. A gap so small … an exit that should never have been an exit.
On the passenger’s seat, Kendy raises his head and stretches his body. Ray eyes him. The dog looks anxious, dignified, in the way only a French bulldog can. Those big opals searching Ray’s face for answers. A real Winston Churchill look-alike. On a good day, that look might make Ray laugh. The anamorphic, prime-ministerial traits of a creature who eats his own shit.
‘Sorry, mate,’ Ray says, reaching over the centre console and patting Kendy’s head, ‘but I don’t like our chances. I reckon she’s gone … I reckon it’s all gone.’
Kendy’s nostrils flare and he gets up on his hind legs, his paws resting on the dashboard. He’s watching something. Out the front of the pub, Frank O’Grady, the publican, is talking to one of the firies, wide-brimmed hat pressed to his chest like an armour over his heart.
A rope of black drool unspools from Kendy’s mouth, coils on the dashboard. The firies turn off their hoses and start packing up their equipment. O’Grady turns, looking in Ray’s direction, raising his hat and waving in a wide arc. His face is ashen, his blue-checked flannelette shirt covered in grime. Sixty metres between them, maybe less.
‘How many points if I run that prick down?’ Ray drops the clutch, throats the key, starts the engine. Justice sometimes, he thinks, is a fast bastard.
Last night, a flutter of spotlights, smoke barely distinguishable from the orange and silver dark. The bush crunching, howling, crashing. O’Grady had stood in the door of the pub, clutching the frame. His face changing suddenly, lit up like Christmas as a fire engine wailed down the clay road, its siren the bleating of a thousand goats. Ray turned back towards his ute, Kendy and Poppy yapping. Her claws chattering on the glass.
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ O’Grady had said, barely making eye contact. ‘There’s families here. They might hurt one of the kids.’
‘They’re fucking French bulldogs. They’re harmless, Frank. You know that.’
‘We can’t risk it, Ray. We just can’t.’
Inside the pub, a couple of families unfurling their sleeping bags on the floor, two women stirring pots on camper stoves, a few men at the bar downing heady beer from frosted glasses. None of them had looked at Ray. Not that they ever did. Not since his wife. They’d loved her. Not him. Especially since Garry Bryan had found Ray, all those years back, the day after her funeral, unconscious in the driver’s seat, blood spilling from his head like a crimson veil, his car bonnet scythed around a ghost gum, black smoke pouring from the engine. They’d said there weren’t any skid marks. But Ray couldn’t remember. He’d made sure of that.
‘You’re a goddamn cunt, Frank.’
O’Grady had lowered his head. ‘Hate me, Ray. I get it. I do. But I’ve got to do what’s best for the community. I’m sorry, mate.’
Ray clenched his fist so hard he thought his knuckles would pop. ‘Hope the lotta you fucking burn to death!’ he’d growled, charging back to his ute, Poppy bouncing on the driver’s seat, pawing at the gap in the window.
Less than forty metres now. If it wasn’t for him … O’Grady’s footfalls clapping dust off the road. As if that fuckhead had forgotten every phrase in the English language except I’m sorry. Ray jams the gearstick into first. The wheel, soft as flesh, hot under his grip. His fingers forming wells. He revs the engine, lets out the clutch. The car lurches forward.
O’Grady stops. He’s in the middle of the road. He’s yelling something, but the sound of the engine is all-consuming. The ute barrelling towards him, gaining speed. Twenty metres and closing.
Kendy howls. Ray eyes him sideways. The dog’s staring—not at O’Grady but at him. Those wet eyes speaking a language only Ray can understand.
‘Fine. Fuck!’
Ray floors the clutch, drops gears, yanks the handbrake, swings the wheel hard right. The engine bawls, chokes. The back tyres seize up. He slams the accelerator, lets down the handbrake. O’Grady drops, shields his face with his arms. Ray holds the turn, narrowly missing him. His back end wings. The tyres spitting dust, then rocks. An artillery of earth smashing O’Grady.
‘Gravel rash cunt,’ Ray grumbles. He drops the clutch, straightens the car out, hits the accelerator and fangs it up the road, straight out of town.
***
In the east, the sun hovers over the ranges, a red marble in a skein of milk. Ray runs his hand over the ridges of Kendy’s back, collecting fur on his fingers. He’s been here for twenty minutes, staring at his front gate, unable to believe it’s still there. Half the fence is gone, of course. Posts little more than black stalagmites, planted charcoal. The barbed wire, copper scar tissue against the shadowed earth. The tyres he’d wired up to the gate last summer, melted through, leaving strange alien puddles on the drive.
But still, the gate’s survived. If God weren’t a cunt, Ray might call this a miracle.
He climbs through the back seat, out the back window and into the tray, drops his legs over the side and hits the dust. He turns, seeing that dent the shape of his boot in the driver’s door. Fuck me.
He trudges over to the gate, unclasps the chain, yanks it open. It screams and scuttles, leaving a chalk quarter-circle over the drive. He looks back. Kendy is up on his hind paws, staring out the back window, his head going left to right. Jesus, the boy’s lost the love of his life.
***
How small they’d been when he’d bought them. Five years back, when they were supposed to be his way out of livestock. Breed a few litters at six thousand per pup and he’d be set for retirement. It was supposed to be easy.
But then, the dodgy asshole he’d bought them off had sold them over a month premature, and Ray had been forced to syringe feed. He had no idea what he was doing. They eeped incessantly, worming around in his hands as he tried to put the syringe between their bloated pink lips. Their eyes blue, half open, and their skin translucent, they looked like emaciated mice. One wrong move and they’d’ve choked, or worse even, drowned on formula. The milky substance left tiny white beards on their chins.
Worried, he’d set their box by the side of his bed, spent money he’d been saving for retirement on a proper heat mat and heat lamp. At night, unable to sleep, he stared at them curled into each other. A Yin–Yang.
It was supposed to be only for those first six weeks, while the pups still needed formula. But Ray had never had dogs before. He’d only left town a handful of times in his life, and once was for his wedding. He’d been out, alone, on that property for over a decade. Now, someone needed him. He watched them learn to walk, eat kibble, yelp at magpies, chase rats in the shed.
One night, he’d woken up. Poppy was perched on his chest, licking his chin. He couldn’t work out how she’d gotten up there. He flicked on his bedside light and stared at her. Her eyes were wide, like someone had just yelled. She was so tiny. He scratched her pitched ears and let her curl into a half moon. Ray peered over the edge of the bed. Kendy was still asleep. ‘The married couple,’ he muttered, holding Poppy to his chest. He’d sworn he’d never share a bed with dogs.
At thirteen months, Poppy was old enough to breed. Her second heat had come and gone. He’d kept them separated, worried Kendy might work out how to mount her. She wasn’t ready, he told himself. Most days, Kendy slept in the shed, while Poppy followed him from paddock to paddock as he watered the last of his goats. At night, they curled up together on top of him and watched whatever garbage was playing on free-to-air. He talked to them like he would his kids, if he’d ever had them, imparting life lessons about how to treat the land. When Kendy, twice her size, stole Poppy’s food, Ray would pick Kendy up and put him outside. ‘That’s not how you treat your wife!’
Sometimes, he’d have entire conversations with them, impersonating them, doing their voices. In his mind Poppy was a ballerina working on a tell-all memoir about the excesses of modelling. Kendy, on the other hand, was true-blue, a bucky trade unionist without a clue. If anyone asked, they met in Bali.
Three years went by. Every heat he kept them separated. Whenever pups crossed his mind, he thought of the scalpel, of Poppy slit down the middle like a bowl of jelly. Her body winched open, vices holding her in place on the metal tray. Her bloated organs and exposed arteries. The weeks and weeks of recovery. The zipper-like scar. To think none of them could breed naturally. He’d watched C-sections and they were brutal. Year after year he kept telling himself, there is always next season.
Ray spits into the dust, kicks it. If only he hadn’t come back screaming blue murder. Both of them waiting in the driver’s seat, waiting for their dad. She was always skittish, he should have known better. She’d never have jumped … the gap was so tiny … Never. She wasn’t like Kendy. She was the clever one.
‘Fuck,’ he says, climbing in through the back window. ‘I’m sorry, mate.’
Kendy drops onto all fours, stares at him as if saying, It’s okay, Dad.
***
A kilometre down the driveway, he knows he’s lost everything. The neighbour’s place is gone. The scatter of eucalypts and native ferns are dead roots in a dry swamp.
A cargo plane drones overhead and Ray pulls up, watching it. Way out, on the southernmost distance, a knot of low mountains form smudged finger prints. Curlicues of smoke rise from a point between them. He watches the plane open its steel belly, a sheet of water glistening like a kaleidoscope smashed open. Steam spewing into the atmosphere.
‘Desperate idiots,’ he murmurs.
Up ahead, the climb before his property dips into a shallow gully, the supposed haven where his old fibro sits. Not a hundred metres off to his right, what’s left of his shed. A cross-stitch of sheet metal now the blackness of volcanic ash, a giant, archaic suture over the land.
Ray shudders, looks up at the climb. A few gums with leaves at their peaks, brilliant green against the grey of the land and sky. He hums to himself, sucks his teeth. Blinks three times before looking again. The leaves are still there.
Ray restarts the engine. He takes the climb at fifteen ks, worried that if he drives too quickly, he’ll somehow manifest destruction. Halfway up, halos of long grass, smoke-stained, swaying in the wind. Near the peak, a shimmer of blue flowers. At the top, it’s as if the fires never passed through, the land dry with drought but still alive. Kendy climbs onto the dashboard and presses his face to the glass. Ray leans forward, his eyes trailing upward. Overhead, a black cockatoo is circling.
***
Hope is a bastard. All that’s left of Ray’s fibro is the crapper and the chimney. Unpromising passages to the afterlife. He gulps down hot saliva, climbing out of the tray. It’s just nails and timber, render, cement and cladding. It doesn’t howl when it’s lonely.
Staring at the smoke-blasted porcelain of the toilet, he remembers the way Poppy would cry whenever he was taking a shit. How she’d whine that he’d locked her out, scratch at the door demanding entry. How he’d open the door a crack and she’d squeeze in, immediately trying to jump into his lap, his pants at his ankles and a wad of toilet paper in his hand. It seems only fitting that the last image he has of her is her jumping through the gap in the window, her ass flying past his face, her charging into Satan’s bowel movement. There, in the sea of smoke, blood-red darkness. His girl. Disappearing.
She never even looked back.
He wipes the wetness from his cheeks and pries open the passenger’s door. Kendy, jumping from the seat, whips circles at his feet. His pitched ears. His eyes alive. He stops abruptly, stiffens, looks towards the remains.
‘What is it, boy?’
In the dust, beneath the collapsed living room wall, Ray sees something move. A lumbering in the wreckage.
Kendy’s halfway to the house before Ray even knows what he’s seeing.
The dialectic of trauma: a review of Anders Villani’s ‘Totality’
It’s ironic that I’m writing this review the morning after a total lunar eclipse. Ironic because this is not only the event that Anders Villani structures his second-coming poetry collection around, dividing the collection into the four phrases of the eclipse—but also the moment I managed to miss despite it first lighting up my socials, and then literally lighting up the sky. Totality, incidentally the title of Villani’s collection, describes the exact point between second and third contact when the moon’s disk completely covers the sun, spraying light across our atmosphere and turning the moon a blood red. And it is this image, as well as the slow convergence and reveal of the moon across the phases of an eclipse, that denote the ‘tellable’ and ‘untellable’ unravelling throughout Totality—a collected work that explores trauma’s reverberations in a body that just can’t help remembering.
Fortunately, unlike the eclipse, I can return, time and again, to Villani’s work. This is a must, considering the formidable architecture, extended lyricism and profoundly idiosyncratic poetic and personal conflicts at play here—the constant to-and-fro between things hidden and those revealed.
In an early poem, ‘Pedagogy’, images are consciously and consistently obfuscated, allowing the poem to speak to the often polarised paradigms of rural masculinities, both desired and inherited, both shame-filled and shameless. Personified through the imperative second-person ‘you’, the poem embodies a sparring match that implies the nature of disclosure and concealment as trauma-informed, as masculine—and inevitably, their irreconcilability. Villani elegantly disrupts meaning through parallelism and enjambment using an A-line indent followed by a B-line outdent. This format creates a rigid roll of centred text that asks us if there is meaning or a lack thereof, exacted in the positioning of opposites:
‘You don’t teach them mouth, aperture,
sputter, curdle, but leopard
cub and teat…’
Juxtaposing images of animal rearing, Villani shows conflicting accounts of how we care for ourselves and others: rope-taught, compartmentalised and mechanical— ‘the mouth’, ‘the aperture’; or intimately engaged through an awareness of shared life—’ cub and teat’. The inference is that the doctrines of patriarchal masculinities rupture us from our truer selves, as does trauma, which reminds me of bell hooks writing about the first act of male violence being a form of self-mutilation, and how this engenders violence against others. Villani later writes:
‘They don’t need to be retaught. You
don’t teach them rock
opens to dirt when it finds a nape…’
At once, Villani shows the violence of male self-objectification—of understanding the male body as embodying an infallible vessel, in this case, a ‘rock’, evidently impermeable to future pain. Too, he observes how violence is propelled, not softening into ‘dirt’ when coming in contact with the intimate, ‘the nape’—instead, opening it up, rejecting care. Villani proceeds to ask, throughout the collection, how bodies that have become synonymous with privilege and power (aka male, able-bodied)—schooled in systems of shame that expect infallibility—can relate experiences of extreme violation and utter powerlessness.
The poem ‘Interval’ (a recurrent title in the collection) opens as ‘the garage door lowers’—a disquieting allusion to a suicide attempt, Villani writing ‘there is no afternoon’. And yet, a suggestion of innocence, perhaps lost, perhaps lingering, as the subject ‘ease[s] the bike incline to level’, bars the doors, and then admits to 3 things like a child counting off his fingers, each relatively innocuous when observed in isolation. Cumulatively, these images—one: a volcano panorama swaying on a floor; two: a shirtless self in a mirror; three: ‘doghair and pinkish lint on the drier’—embrace the minuteness and specificity of embodied flashbacks, but also the fragmentariness of trauma as relived, as retold.
As psychologist Judith Herman writes, ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.’ Like many poems in the collection, this poem may embody a desire to reconcile this central dialectic. So compartmentalised, so specific, so lacking in context, these three images constitute acts in remembering and forgetting—as Villani puts it, ‘intervals of thrash and limpness’ (another recurrent line), where power is dispelled, regained but ultimately called into question. Villani, through experiences minutely intimate, through language evocatively poetic and architectural, is able to reveal and conceal simultaneously. Poetry, it seems, for Villani, is both the shield and the microphone.
One of the longer poems in the collection, ‘Map to Mutable Manhood’—arguably my favourite Villani poem, and introduced in ‘Third Contact’—tells of a 20-something rolling through tender and violent intimacies, both embodied and observed. As a boy sleeps with his friend’s seventeen-year-old sister, holding her face with hands like a ‘Callused / gondola’ (pg. 83), his group of mates fuck the ‘fat local girl’, telling the boys they blew ‘all over’ her. As Villani writes:
‘Songs fathers won’t sing to sons
Until they’re ready. Epics, anthems, manifestos, prayers.
Rebuke yourself for not going.
You’re a pussy. A weak faggot, like the joke. Fuck you
and the jetty squids you watched
once the others had left for the house down the road,
the squids you told secrets.’ (p.84-85)
Again, we see this push and pull between the vulnerable and the brutal, the concealed and revealed, secrets expunged in waters full of squids. While sexual violence is celebrated, even bragged about. Terrence Real, an American psychologist who predominantly writes about masculinity and relationships, speaks to how men are ‘schooled in abuse’ (Real, 1997, p. 118). This schooling and its shifting and yet ever-violent paradigms are never more evident than in this poem, again relating a dialectic poised between exposure and secrecy.
When it comes to talking about these doctrines of masculinity, of these polarising and unreconcilable distances between the self as powerless and the self now seeking power through language—the dichotomy of the concealed and the revealed—there are few poets more skilled than Villani in Australia. Perhaps, though, one frustrating element to Villani’s collection, for me, made here self-referential in the noted ‘squids’—those ink-spilling underwater critters—is that the poems, at times, are too self-aware, too shackled to pre-conceived ideas of the poet, to notions of the poet’s architecture, to what poetry must constitute. Here, in a country where poetry is so undervalued and the industry so small, this is understandable; there is an expectation of sound, style, and movement—an often implicit but sometimes explicit demand for the obscure, the mystic, the cryptic, over the lexiconic, the direct, the digestible.
Recently a poet friend told me he was joking with his mate about poets jumping hurdles trying to avoid words as macabre as ‘tree’ (‘oh, look, the broccoli is malting’, they might say). It seems that poets are told, time and again, that they must write poetry—not just write. As a poet myself, I know how this can affect the work, especially when the poet tries to reject these expectations—in learning, tries to unlearn. So often, when we just try to write, the poet’s register enters the frame unconsciously. It abruptly disrupts the reading—making the reader acutely aware they’re reading poetry, an object densely constructed, adhering to form, adhering to craft, instead of making these factors invisible. The poem in this sense, like the poet, becomes self-aware, and the craft of writing good poems becomes the craft of being a good poet. I see this so often in jarring shifts in register—in a scaling from the informal and lexiconic, to the formal and obscure, as if the poem is trying to justify the stanza before by slipping ‘poetry’ back in—by obfuscating the direct.
In the States, there’s a whole world of poets, however, who’ve mastered this slippage—and can weaponise it in impressive and surprising ways. Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson and Ocean Vuong, to name a few. And true, there’s a growing movement, or perhaps a resurgence, of Australian poets capable of scaling up and down register when needed—people versed in slippage who rarely, if ever, let the poet aesthetic, the poetry of the thing, disrupt the overall movement. Poets like Hasib Hourani, Anwen Crawford, Dan Hogan and Harry Reid are experts in complex register shifts. Magically, in these shifts, they rarely, if ever, shake us out of the work, or make us acutely aware that what we’re reading is this thing called poetry.
Villani, too, is profoundly adept at these shifts—to suggest otherwise would be dishonest. Here is a poet clearly at the height of his craft. And yet there are times when the intrusive authorial voice—or poetic voice—subsumes the subject’s voice, resulting in the odd jarring sentence construction or over-calculated word choice. It’s as if Villani is saying in these moments: I must be a poet. I won’t name the handful of times this happens in the collection (honestly, it’s rare, and I’m being picky). However, I’ll signal to the passage above: why the word ‘rebuke’ when the language surrounding it leans so heavily on the conversational, the juvenile, the colloquial? Was this the product of a deep reverence for craft—an overworking?
Perhaps Villani could argue these slippages, these shifts in register, signpost the distances and proximities he notes in trauma discourse, and for which I’ve discussed; maybe the poet has to be there, always self-aware, to continue to conceal, to create physic separation. Perhaps this is a failing of me as a reader in respecting craft, though I suppose I hoped as the collection progressed for less concealment, not more; much like the lunar phases, I wanted revelation, directness—less neat poetic tricks. Though, maybe considering the collection’s focus on childhood trauma, this is asking too much—perhaps I should be critiquing an industry that consistently expects all your traumas laid bare. I’ll say, though, I remain hungry for more lines as simple, direct, and punchy as this:
‘I still wonder if being violated
made me a better person. A gentler man.’ (p. 126)
Regardless, Villani is an expectational poet, the sort of poet many of us dream of being. And there are so many startling, memorable lines throughout Totality which made me return many times to watch words and meanings expand and contract, yet never quite reveal themselves in full. In Villani’s ability to balance the unreconcilable, to melt the abstract into the intimate, to fuse the lexiconic with the painfully poetic, Totality is a powerful evocation for work that’s both searing and quiet, both overstated and understated—both a punch thrown and a punch drawn.
what i’m reading
My relationship with reading has always been fraught. Like most writers I know, I often feel overwhelmed, even affronted, by the stacks of books that, despite my best efforts, steadily grow by the side of my bed. Like most writers I know, I’ve never felt like I read enough, am reading enough, have read enough. Like most writers, my reading habits are shameful, lazy, perhaps disingenuous.
Whoever said writing and reading, there are no short cuts, should have added procrastination and excuse-making—the bedfellows of an emerging writer. Most people don’t want to admit it, but reading, like writing, is hard. It isn’t, sadly, the sort of art form you can just put on in the background at a dinner party. You can’t stroll around a book pretending to understand its complex geometry, remarking I like this one. You can’t just mindlessly scroll on your phone while the book automatically skips to the next chapter. Reading is demanding. Reading is political.
Growing up in a country town, the closest my family came to literary fiction was Mills and Boon; the closest to poetry, the TV guide. My mum is an avid reader only in the sense there’s a book always on her bedside table—but five pages a night is enough for her. So mostly, I read what was front and centre at the school library: in those days, Morris Gleitzman and Emily Rodda. I was 22 before I even heard of a writers festival, and thirty before I attended my first one.
Often, I think Australian literature undercuts the privilege of reading, of getting to read, of knowing what to read, of having access to books and book adjacent events. Of having the sort of brain that picks up the latest must read and just devours it. For so long, I’ve lived in envy of all those people who just plough through novels; the people who always had books right there in front of them and were just able to plod along, enchanted. Maybe it’s my ADHD brain, but so often writing feels like something I have to overcome. So rarely am I hooked by a novel or memoir you might ask, why become a writer at all? Well, like writing, I prefer to have read than to be reading. I like that sense of accomplishment, the inevitable conversations reading leads to. For me, reading is just a beautiful conduit to ideas, to long-winded conversations with friends. Rarely, is it a particularly pleasurable pastime.
When I was in my twenties, I used to lie about how much I read, and sometimes, who I was reading. I did this because I was a writer who barely wrote. I did this because to have read says everything that needs to be said about someone. I did this because writers are supposed to read. One of my favourite first date questions is: ‘What book have you told people you’ve read, but are certain you’ll never read?’ Mine’s Anna Karenina—a book I’ve abandoned on several occasions. For years, I told myself that I’d be nothing until I read Tolstoy. What right did I have to write if I hadn’t even read all The Russians? And then one day I came home to find my copy of old Anna torn into snowflakes—my dogs having decided to do the hard work of destroying it. Christ, I was elated. Tolstoy would no longer stare at me, gloating from the shelves about how I’d failed to read that one book everyone needs to read.
All this talk of not reading might give you the impression that I don’t read all, but the truth is I go through bursts. At 21, I read Murakami’s entire back catalogue in about a month. At 25, I read everything Tim Winton’s ever written (22 books at the time, or there abouts). I did the same with Flanagan and Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick and Bret Easton Ellis (sorry) and Kerouac and Bukowski (double sorry) and Rushdie, and then later, when a female friend aptly pointed out that, shit, you read a lot of men, I read mountains of Margaret Atwood and Maggie Nelson and bell hooks and Helen Garner and Toni Morrison. All that before I started reading poetry, the one thing I can read a lot of, and consistently.
Poetry, for all its wankerisms, for all its unnatural pride and self-love, is an art form that you can dive in an out of—the sort of writing that hooks you with a line, an image, an idea, leaving you satisfied within seconds. It’s writing that can wash over you, suspend you, drop you, demanding little more than a few pages of your time. When I first started reading poetry, I wanted to understand everything; I figured the more I read, the more I’d get it. But I think the inverse is true: poetry is about the opening, not the closing. Expecting conclusions will likely lead to disappointment, frustration or confusion. Why do you have to ‘get’ a line to love it? The truth is, you don’t. Poetry is closer to visual art than it is to say fiction or non-fiction, or even most music, where the constraints of structure expect an introduction, conflict, apex and then a diminuendo. Poetry is a small window; a world framed by just a few stanzas. A metaphor elevated to a sledgehammer or a golden ticket. A place where voice and point of view are everything—where the poet is standing beside you, sharing the view, asking you questions. And perhaps this goes back to something I was saying earlier: reading and writing for me are about community, about connecting the writer with the work, about engaging in a dialogue.
Few will be surprised by the fact that the poetry scene in Australia is fairly insular.
There’s a running joke among poets that the only people who will buy our collections is fellow poets. In many ways this is true. The scene is so small that the line between friend, colleague and that editor who keeps rejecting your poems becomes utterly invisible. As an art form, Australian poetry is so underfunded that an award-winning poet that I deeply respect referred to the scene as ‘pigeons politely fighting over cold chips’. And so, condemned to survival mode, Australian poetry is a community largely talking to itself—benefits and drawbacks abound. For me, someone relatively new to the inner mechanics, the act of reading Australian poetry feels more and more like the start of a conversation, or the continuation of one. Again, the window opens—the poet beside intimately detailing all the refractions, how the light illuminates new ways of knowing.
This year, the Stella Prize opened its doors to forms beyond the novel or memoir or essay collection, with 5 of the 12 long-listed books being collections of poetry. After the announcement at The Wheeler Centre, I spent way too much money buying all the poetry books I hadn’t already read, and on the tram home I began reading them. Almost all of the collections—if you can call all of them collections—are hybrid forms, works that experiment in essay, in short story, in epitaph, in lyric, in still shot. By and large, they are enterprises in restraint and economy where the personal is densely political, where gutsy voice and overt style are mirrored in the truth and importance of the content.
Lucy Van’s The Open and Anwen Crawford’s No Document are both works written in vignettes which deal with the blurring of lines, the reckonings of trauma near and far. For me, Van and Crawford, like many poets, seem desperate to write themselves out of corners that someone else has written them into. In one blurb for Van’s book, she says ‘I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be…’ Perhaps the title The Open leans towards rejecting language that constantly searches for lines, for boundaries, for borders. For building, as Van would say, fences. Again, I’m reminded that poetry isn’t about the closing, but the opening—that poetry’s power lays in its exploratory nature, in its uncertainty, in its ability to find ways to say what cannot be said.
While reading No Document, I was repeatedly reminded of Lebanese-Palestinian poet Hasib Hourani’s line, ‘I write in vignettes because all we have is fragments’—an incredibly poignant observation about what remains, historically and personally, in nations where violent occupation is ritualised. Like No Document, Hourani’s poem speaks to poetry as a form of resistance, as a form of recorded history where erasure seems imminent. But, like almost all the works on the Stella long-list this year, the poem raises questions about the failings of language to engage, to tell, to see. To actually understand.
No doubt, Toby Fitch was right when he recently wrote for this series that ‘reading and writing are tidal processes’. While reading these works I found myself returning to old poetry, to lines I’d forgotten, one in particular that I suspect was inspired by Hourani: ‘What more can I give you, when our lives are just aftermath’. I hope you’ll forgive me now, for a work of poetry that exists in dialogue, particularly to the works named above, but perhaps even more so to a younger self, who never had the language to say what could not be said.
footy should come with a trigger warning
I’ve spent the better half of my adult life trying to avoid anything footy related. This was out of necessity, not choice. Footy triggers me.
AFL is unavoidable in Melbourne. The state’s pastime, it’s a sport that transcends class and social boundaries, weaving its way into almost every community. Anyone from the shit-kicker to the CEO, from the tradie to the poet, can apparently get behind it. Everyone’s got a team, and if you don’t, you better choose one quick.
Since moving to Melbourne in 2020, I’ve felt accosted by AFL culture. Unlike country NSW, where I moved from, footy-talk is everywhere. My first week in Melbourne a woman in a café remarked ‘you bloody tigers’ fan’; carelessly, I’d worn a black and yellow scarf out of the house that morning. In arts circles, I’ve had acquaintances seamlessly transition from the poetry of Omar Sakr to a breakdown of such and such player’s form.
What people don’t understand when they start these conversations with me, when they insist I ‘choose a team’, is that I’ve spent the better half of my adult life trying to avoid anything footy related. This was out of necessity, not choice.
Footy triggers me.
In the house I grew up in, NRL was the beating epicentre of life. I spent my weekends with my dad screaming ‘get up ‘em’ and ‘hold the line’ as six-foot-something men barrelled into each other on the flatscreen, seemingly unaware of the phrase brain damage.
On Thursday nights, we’d clutch out bellies cackling as Reg Reagan on the NRL’s footy-show. Matty John’s alter-ego, Reg would sing ‘bring back the biff’; a larrikin spoof of The Angels’ classic ‘Am I ever going to see your face again’, the song harks back to a time when NRL was more violent.
When my pa was in town, I’d listen to him and dad argue for hours about how the game was changing. Stories of my pa’s footy prowess were passed down to us all like a proficiency. He was supposed to go pro but wasn’t able to afford the train ticket across town. In those days footy players were paid peanuts. Footy was always hard yakka.
I was never going to go pro like I suspect the men of my family hoped. The same bullies who punched me on Friday were on the field on the weekend ready to grab me by the collar. I was slow and pudgy and couldn’t make a tackle for shit. I didn’t have the ball skills, the agility or reflexes, and often cried when some bigger player knocked me to the ground. Sook became my second name.
I pretended to enjoy the game mostly so that I could spend time with my dad.
The first time anyone told me ‘to be a man’, I was eight years old. Some kids had high-jacked a tackle bag while me and my pa waited sideline for my brother to finish footy practice. Pa was reading a newspaper and I wanted to play with the kids, so went over to introduce myself. All they knew was that my brother was a bit shit at footy; coined the BFG, he was a forward who got gifted the easy balls because ‘the coach felt sorry for him’.
The kids started calling me homophobic slurs. Armed with the only ammunition a country kid had, I parroted them. This pissed them off. They took turns slamming me to the ground with the tackle bag. When I screamed for my pa to help me, he didn’t even look over the horizon of the newspaper.
‘Why didn’t you help?’ I said, running to him several minutes later, tears falling down my face, my body aching all over.
‘What do you expect me to do?’ he said, ruffling his paper. ‘Be a man, Timmie—stick up for yourself.’
As a late teenager, I figured my aversion to footy was just rebellion—I didn’t want to be like my dad. Maybe, one day, I’d get back into it. But as I’ve gotten older, and now living in Melbourne, the heart of AFL, I’ve realised this aversion is trauma informed.
Like a lot of men, regardless of code, footy is the outlet for my father’s fury. When it doesn’t give him what he wants he takes that fury out on my family, mostly my mum. It is normal for him to scream obscenities at the TV, and when the game is over and his team has lost, for him to scream obscenities at us. Countless times I’ve prayed for his team to win.
It’s never, as many commentators claim, ‘just a game’. Last year, there was an estimated 20% increase in domestic violence over the Victorian AFL grand final long weekend. In 2019, the NRL State of Origin saw an increase of 40% in domestic violence reports.
The ‘show’ violence in the stadium was echoed through our home. For so many troubled and disenfranchised men like my father, footy is the home of patriarchal masculinity, an opportunity to live vicariously through a sporting industry that seems to encapsulate everything we’re told is essential to being a man. It rewards brute acts of violence with money, fame, success and adoring women. It reinforces a dominator complex, a systemic adherence to physical power at all costs. It is, as American psychologist Terrence Real would say, about ‘power over, rather than power with’. And footy codes across this country do very little to stem the social repercussions of this violent exhibitionism.
No doubt, my father would have found violence with or without the game. But it is impossible for me to untangle the threads, impossible to stop the bile rising in my throat when someone invites me to watch a game. Impossible for me not to fear for my mother when I know a big weekend of footy is coming up. That’s why this weekend, like all weekends, I’ll try my best to avoid the footy.
True Grit: a critical response to Shane Fitzsimmons’s Australia Day address
what shane’s speech reminds me is that while we try to reinvent the wheel, we’re working with the same shitbox car.
The 17th of January 2021. A week before Australia day. Shane Fitzsimmons, former Chief of the NSW RSF, stands in front of a lectern. he’s on stage at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, charged with delivering the NSW Australia Day address. His thin-framed glasses, perched on the end of his nose, scream dorky dad.
Is it Shane’s unassuming demeanour that fools me into thinking he has more to say than men should talk?
That morning, I’d read a stream of online articles declaring his Australia day address a call-to-grace among men. For over a year, news outlets had referred to Shane as the nation’s father. Finally, I’d thought, it’s time for a nuanced, public conversation about men’s mental health. Finally, someone’s going to break the fourth wall, and say, how the hell did we forget about male suicide rates in Australia?
People will actually listen to this man.
Shane began his speech by outlining the shit-show that was 2020. Drought. Fire. Flood. Plague. But midway through, he sidesteps, telling a story about a work colleague who’s afraid people will find out he’s seeing a psychologist. Shane is adamant, “there is no shame in having emotions…”
Sure. An important message. Especially coming from the top brass of Resilience NSW, the lead disaster management agency in the state. But, sadly, one undermined by his own rhetoric:
“so how do we cope in such difficult and complex times? to me, it’s resilience, resilience that is at the heart of Australian culture… you get knocked down, you get back up again. you get bucked off the horse, you dust yourself off, and you sit right back in the saddle and continue on….”
Maybe it’s just me, but the cowboy trope feels dangerous. In Australia, 75% of people who die by suicide are male; of those, more than half are rural.
I grew up around farmers and farming families, many of whom survived decades of drought before they lost their homes to fires. Resilience isn’t new—it’s stoicism 2.0. It’s the same shit different smell, a neurosis at the core of hypermasculinity.
Look, resilience says, it’s fine to fall face first, but it better be into a pushup.
Jess Hill’s See what you made me do looks at a culture of shame and silence among men. While women are shamed for almost everything, men’s shame is entirely centred on being seen as weak. the narrative goes that emotion is the antithesis of strength. Essentially, we can’t let others know that we’re fallible. As Jess illustrates, men will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the façade of being a man, of being in control. of being resilient.
We will hurt others, hurt ourselves.
What Shane’s speech reminds me is that while we try to reinvent the wheel, we’re working with the same shitbox car. he wants us out there talking to each other but he hasn’t even bothered to unpack how stories, like pervasive one’s about stoic cowboys, are the poster-boys for this culture of silence. The normalisation of emotional dialogue and emotional intelligence between men is important, but when it’s grounded in a language of hypermasculinity, it’s self-defeating.
Shane had the chance to talk, with real scope, about men’s mental health. He had the chance to name and shame governments who have disinvested in mental health services, particularly in rural communities. He had the chance to talk about the inaccessibility of men’s mental health services. He had the chance to talk about the devaluation of rural identity in the Australian socio–political landscape, as well as the challenges of rural living. He had the chance to say to men: let’s talk and here’s how.
Instead, he asked cowboys to be cowboys.
If you or anyone else you know is struggling, please contact:
Help is out there.
Redefining masculinity: How Rick Morton and Corey White have thrown out the rule book
between smoke breaks, these wise-cracking 30-somethings are redefining masculinity without shying away from it.
Rick Morton and Corey White are a part of a new school of Australian male writers. Between smoke breaks, these wise-cracking 30-somethings are redefining masculinity without shying away from it. In 100 Years of Dirt and The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory, Morton and White are honest about their shortcomings, exploring issues of drug dependency, self-harm, mental health and anger management. Where so many male writers tackling toxic masculinity have died on the hill of moral absolution, Morton and white talk about when they fucked up. They aren’t saints. they’re humans. Their vulnerability is essential in destigmatising weakness, in creating a therapeutic dialogue about masculinity, and all the bastards that come with it.
So rich with philosophical and socio–cultural history, 100 Years of Dirt, Morton’s debut memoir, is cerebral and emotionally charged. His deft transitions from the universal to the intimate give him the grace to negotiate his families’ complex relationship with land, trauma, class and male violence. George, Morton’s grandfather, once the owner of a cattle station reported to be the size of Belgium, was a callous and cruel man. Isolation emboldened his abuse. despite hating George, Rodney, Morton’s father, was cut from the same cloth. At age 7, Morton walked in on his father having an affair. His mum, Deb, was away at the time nursing his brother, Tony, who had been rushed to hospital after being severely burnt. On her return, Rodney left Deb. For years, he refused to pay child support. Deb, the unrewarded hero of this memoir, struggled to keep the family afloat. Tony, developing an ice addiction, began to mirror his father’s violence.
It would be reductionist to label 100 Years of Dirt as a search for forgiveness. While Morton shows a great deal of compassion for his father, his work speaks to the traumatic culture inherent to traditional masculinity.
“To understand a person you must understand his father. This is true of Rodney and it is true of myself, too. Ours is a trauma passed from one generation to another, family heirlooms bequeathed by the living. ”
Morton makes it clear that his issues with intimacy and self-love are inter-generational. He knows his father has suffered. Vulnerability is a new way forward, a subversion of violence that speaks to a common humanity.
In humanising his father, he rejects a cruel linage, and he assumes responsibility for his life.
“Of course I still love dad, but I don’t know why.”
Corey White’s The Prettiest Horse in the Glue Factory similarly explores intergenerational trauma in the scope of male violence. From a young age, Corey was witness to his dad’s horrific abuse. When Corey’s mum died of an overdose, his dad ended up in prison. Corey, lodged in the foster system, was the victim of sexual and psychological mistreatment. Believing education was his out, Corey compulsively studied, earning himself a spot at an elite private school. There, social humiliation was routine. Feeling out-classed at university, Corey turned to drugs and sex for escape, debasing his body in ways reminiscent of Bukowski.
Corey isn’t interested in self-aggrandisement or blame. Instead, he’s deeply philosophical and brutally honest. For some sons of DV, there’s the ever present fear of becoming the father.
“It took me being stripped of my humanity for me to gain humanity. Without this, I think I would have become my father. ”
Corey’s taken great care illustrating his pain, but he doesn’t weaponise it, nor assume a pretence of sainthood. Like Morton, he can still see the shadow of his father looming over him.
“I was not a good partner… I had a severe inability to regulate my own emotions.”
Both Morton and White are didactic writers who have discarded male affectation to make room for emotional intelligence. In literature, it’s hardly revolutionary for a male protagonist to have a difficult relationship with his father, nor his masculinity. These writers show us that real change begins by expressing pain with truth and vulnerability.
Further essential Australian writing on toxic masculinity:
On Drugs by Chris Fleming
See what you made me do by Jess Hill
Night Games by Anna Krien
The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr
Invisible Boys by Holden Sheppard
Milk and Hunee
iem startin to git to the uver end of me haytred
photograph by james cater, 2019
Iem startin to git to the uver end of me haytred im backin is rooted trayla beepbeepbeep offlowdin that hideeus dingee inta the water hoo for fuck sake paynts a thing that horred cullar cooldnt fink of a werss fuckin ideer. Yeh yeh well hes outta the car alreddy at it unravellin this and that mayks me swet just watchin the barsted aint cummin off light and hes tuggin hallin cersin warter lappin at is neees and thair I is dri futted slumped nuzzlen a ciggarett ien im finkin he’s the damdest fool I eva seen and certanly onlee won Im assoseeatin.
‘Givus a hand, wood ya?’ he’s callin and I hardlee budg an inch fuck u mate do it yaself this wos ur fuckin ideer not myn downt even like fuckin fishin. But is ies are hooks and Im stundd mullet so I haggel ova thair stingin with a hangova comin bluddy well howpin this morninll b ova bfor i finish blinkin god sayve the qeen I got no bluddy howp.
‘Fuck wat wer u doin? Wat? Waytin for an inveetashon?’
Meen ignorraymus screwin up those prick ofa lips wonts an answer he aynt gettin undoenn me laysays and flingin me boots ova tha rim inta tha tray trudgin inta tha icy warter feelen lica baga diks. So now wear at it pantin sqeelen steemin me lungs tha last thowssand ciggarets fuck me hes still got the fuckin fing tyied up real screw ball messin wif me a fist fulla chain round the towbar. Howd I fuckin miss it is aneewons gess best watch imself Ill choke him get the God rite out of his gowt lucky little bastard comin off so qick and the bowt goin owt swimmin. I tern back me ciggaret gon soggy seein sum nosy mol at the start of the wharf neerby assessin oww entyre sitchuashon and I can tell by the way me old maytes lickin his see salt lips lookin back at er that if sheed offered it up hed be down for a screw even tho shes twiiss his age and twiiss his wayt with a fass lica fuckin see monsta. Prick disgusts me wif his lust next min heel b grabbin rubbin yankin his cock thinkin hes got the see ta imself menacin goblen wif his tendollacut busted teef and face ya mumma coodnt love. Cept this gurl. Jeez shit shes keen assa cocky inna cornfeeld waddlin ova ere not evena fiftee meeters makin me nuts pack up piss off meenwyle old mate gleemin goin those rungs real slow cashual rope in his teef lyke the fucker finks hes Rambo.
‘Where yous off to?’ she says comin in clowss twerlin a derty loc of her air btween er pidjon thumb and pistol finga holy mutha blottin out tha sun with her hed fuckin minds me of a sqished wartermelon.
On clowser inspectshon I reckon she cant be no owlda than thurty ruffly is age ten years me seenya but jeez if tha crack pipe aint dun her sum disirvace looks like half her fayce bout to drop off shes mutton chop me bulldogs got beta teef and it spends its day lickin its own arsshole.
‘Just goin fora fish’ he sais real keen real prowd like hes tawkin to Victoreea’s Seecrat stoopid fucker thinkin hes a pimp wot ya think thatsa lamborgeenee ya gon hitchin up thair.
‘Nice nice’ she sais asif shes got sumwhere else ta b but I ken tell no qeshgins sheed mutch ratha b onna back than goin thru this layzee flurtin ifuckin eechuther animals inna setta headlights shite.
Well hes clearly calqulatin that next delisheeus lien gonna seel the deel for reel or atleest damwelltry and corss I carnt be stuffed wif eever of em im goin for land larfin unda me breff thinkin how do the lownly sirvive. ‘Well ya free layter on?’ Howlee shite! thats is move fucken Ive had tiem ta grab me boots tie me laces smoke harfa dart fink up ways to mayca deesent buck fuckin wayt harfa sencheree for that bullshit coulda had er and split allreddy ya slow little prick. But ya no then agayn I got ta be understanding shoodnt tayk nuffin for granted Im reel luckee ya see big secsee cunt got tha moves the tawk the intelliguntss pussees like pennies always cumin and goin aint nuffin im eva reelly finkin of. Sum of us gotit others dont shooldnt hold it aygaysst aman.
‘Yeh’ she says still curlin her finga and thum fru that ratnesthivv up on er head wunda how long it tooka ta fuckit up that bad.
‘Well ya want to come to my place for a cofee?’ he says shit eeters grinnin aint it obvious to aneeone wif ies eres eitha that thair aint nuffin less secsee than coffee that kinda blak bitta shit that I drink wif me nan wen shes ova fora visit not this fuckin joker no way no howw he finks were all wet dreamin ova a cuppa instent.
‘Yeh shore why not. Wen will yous b back?’
Bawls deep! I carnt hardly beleeve it hoo is this woman weared she cum from hes fownnd is eqell she coodnt posseblee exist iem helloosenating or sumfin my daygerus mined wants im happee fuckin no way it carnt b that eesy for im.
‘I got church at nine’ he says ‘should be dun by 11. Pick ya up after that.’ Noww hes bringin god inta tha eqashon… fuck… so clawss but hes settin yaself up for a failin coz thair aint nuffin secsee bout an angry big barstad lives up in da clouds finks he nos best prown to singin chantin gospel spittin tellin longarss storees bout men billding bowts owt ta sayv all tha animals.
‘What church do ya go to? Maybe I can cum wif.’
Huh gett fuckeddd! this is sum sorta trick … decepshon the devel hoo fuckin payda … throw piss in me eyes call me Elvis and Eev I must be arsleep ...
‘Growndswell. Ya heard of it?’ He aint missa beat ...
‘Yeh yeh’ she says fuckin bloomin. ‘Used to be a Hills girl meself but they aint got no church down ere. Havent been in a wyle asa result.’ ‘Cum wif me’ he says Mr minista of tha whole fuckin congregation. ‘Ull be me gest.’ I watch em fru the windscreen rearview mirror thair swappin numbers prabably hummin gears crunchin me slowly yankin that rooted trailer up out of the water thinkin I shood look inta the church meself blessed be the pussy and all that shite God givin us the tools and the froowt to consoom shorely he aint against a hungree barstad. Reckon all thisis tha only reeson that flurty gasbag bak thair gos ta church hes told me as such a few tiems on tha hunt he says for sum sayntly tang finkin thats whair all them happy famlees hang wyle hes piening ta be a farfer pirsonellee cooldnt fink of nuffin worse than havin kids sum straglee munchkin hangin off me angkel sayin poppa this and poppa that in me hed its fuck off kid im doin shite. On the radio is gospil junk even tho ive towld im a duzen bluddy tiems I cannot fuckin standit reeverend such and so arrguin its forgivness that deefinds us that is christjens not me tho im forgivin for shore hav ta be ta live wif this prick or mayb I aint got many opshons. Jus wayt ere a min till tha lovas are done wat the fucks tha time begs the qeshtin wat tha hell am I doin up how much shite can this fucker spill bout the power of the almytee at this ungodly ower hey won sec got me finkin might b sum good mateereeal ere sum lieners I can yoos on the laydels. I thum the switch up settlin in liete a dart got sum ingreedeeents going carnt mayke no cents of it milk and hunee follow the leeder Im fuckin lost stuff this shite pussy aint everyfing its easy peesy anyways jus ya watch me Ill catch it god no god wateva. If ya ask me probs gods only in it ta watcha ya tayka dump whack his wayel siezed weezel as ya hop in tha shower finga is volcaino plugholel gettin at it wif ya missus that eegle ied snoop city siezed peeper. I smack the bluddy switch move on wif me lief CD alreddy fuckin sabbath ion man classic nasty trak got me bobbin and smackin the dash dancin man dancin. Neck minet theres taptaptap look up fru the derty glass ugly pricks thair claspin a slip of papa shit eaters grin unkanny unreel bastards got god in his pearls. I slink down the window ein im up finkin jeez look at that fuckin handwritin musta dropped out in yeer too only dickbag I no hoo aint got a mobyl phone cordin to im carnt fuckin afford nun hahahahaha.
‘C wat i got?’
‘I c. I c.’
‘Whatcha fink?’
‘Fuckin milk and hunee man. Milk and hunee.’