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.
