Venue: Hobart Bookshop
Date: 25 September 2014
Launch: Blue Giraffe, guest editor Pete Hay; general editor Peter Macrow
Launch speech: Anne Kellas
Editorial details at the end of this page.
I want to begin by saying congratulations to
the guest editor of this edition, Pete Hay – you have done a wonderful job.
Congratulations of course to Peter Macrow too, for presenting this offering of
exquisite poetry periodically for the appreciators of poetry and for poets
alike. It is a precious object to my mind.
Our little grandson and I had a conversation about
space recently, as one does with someone who is 3. He told me he lived on
planet earth. Which planet did I live on, he asked? Planet earth, I answered –
We all live on planet earth. No no, he insisted, and proceeded to tell me very
seriously that one of his grandparents "lived on another planet" ! I
thought we had better leave any further discussion of this concept for another
time. But let’s think for a minute: we know in the scheme of things our planet,
when viewed from the outermost edges of the galaxy, is just one tiny blue dot.
From the general perspective of the vast
landscape of poetryland, looking across the sea of poetry magazines,
let’s contemplate that little planet we know as Blue Giraffe. Like our
own small blue dot of a planet, when you get up close and personal with this
magazine and put your hands in its soil, it is so amazingly full of rich and
diverse life. What I hear in Blue Giraffe is original. Varied. Diverse. The
best of the blue planet of poetry. How refreshing it is to read this
collection. That is always so with Blue Giraffe. I know I will be able to read
it, in one hit, and without feeling nauseous. I feel satisfied, rewarded,
filled, inspired.
The analogy holds from another point of view: Blue
Giraffe spins along in its orbit, beholden to no one. You can be fairly
sure of its consistent quality of output, under guest editors too: it keeps its
hallmark qualities. Those qualities are hard to pin down. They are not to be
found in lists, like the top ten tips for successful poems that Mike Ladd
recently put out (https://sawriters.org.au/2014/09/09/ten-tips-successful-poem/) Now I know what pleases Mike Ladd
… but what pleases Blue Giraffe, who knows, except that for sure it is fine
craftsmanship.
With this approach, Blue Giraffe has always
been more about the poem than the poet. I suppose that is why there are no
author biographies, though I for one miss their guiding presence — guiding by
way of a map, who lives where, because I am curious to know the geography of
poetry land, that’s all). I do want to know
something about the poet. I want to know if Diane Hicks Morrow IS Canadian as I
guess she is (I just happen to know Laurie Brinklow is Canadian. I also happen
just to know that Laurie Brinklow has always been a prose poet, and here she is
breaking out in a different style … and how excellently too).
What can explain the mystery of why a poem
works in its totality, and why an editor should choose it, and not another? By
their works we shall know them. I quote from earlier launch speech for Blue
Giraffe: Ivy Alvarez (geographic note:
now living in New Zealand) wrote:
"Here, in this quiet
publication, it is poem pitted against poem. We are away from the drama of the
poet as persona. We often make too much of the personal in our Poetry Land: the
cliques, the fashions, the schools, this or that group."
This gives every issue of Blue Giraffe its own unique flavour.
A poem must stand on its own legs regardless of its author. I confess though
that I took to Google and found it really interesting (not useful for
understanding anything, but just that, interesting) to know that Lyndon Walker is involved in psychotherapy, that J
K Murphy has been published by Puncher and Wattmann, and John Carey by Picaro Press. That
Maureen Scott Harriss is Canadian, that Nola Firth is an advocate for dyslexia
awareness, that John
Upton has extensive drama credits for TV and
stage over 25 years and has recently returned to poetry, that Ross Jackson is a retired
teacher living in Perth, that Monique Serada works in northern Tasmania. These
facts don’t alter how I react to their poetry, but they don’t detract from them
either, and show how this magazine works hard to include work from a wide range
of voices. But back to the publication — after all this
IS a magazine that forces us away from orienting our reading by the name of the
poet, back to the page, to the poem, to the words, to the image, the art of the
poem itself. Something builds. Something strong.
All these poems have one thing in common: they do not
use tricks. For instance, the sheer
simplicity of a snow scene is captured by MAUREEN SCOTT HARRIS in her poem, ‘here (Saskatchewan)’:
where the road turns at the corner
towards the bush
at the edge of the bush the land
rushing off in all directions
how shadows seep across the fields
away from the sun
wind sounding the spruce trees and
scouring the snow
each morning a new drift
a different light
See? No tricks. No striving. Just being poem.
Make no
mistake that is not to say there is anything simplistic here. Chris Wallace
Crabbe once said, IF POETRY can only capture the withness, the feathers, of
dreams, it still can produce those remarkable liminal sensations of our
whirling, falling or flying into the unsaid; it can hand over to us momentary
swatches of the mystical; it can outflank linear discourse."
LIZ McQUILKIN uses language
to do this, to work to a high pitch of richness. What her poem achieves for me
is an almost tactile impression of words making their own natural landscape: she
tells me she invented some of the words – after all, Shakespeare did so! Perhaps
she will read it for us herself:
Directions for Trip
(in Tasmania’s
Central Highlands)
Strike out north,
then west,translicing
button-grass plains.Beware the
sub-terra creeksas eyebound you
footle a tussock,
hazard another
and another.
Follow the
almost-pathinto hillopes of
sclerophyll.Legloose in
skyling eucalypts,your boots will
snapple branches,ringdoom rock and
stone.
Pick up the river
gurglance
on your right.
Let it lead you
through banksia
and tangster ti-tree
to a hand-deep,
swifting stream
swirling on
opalsome pebbles.
North now, along
its shorethen west,
scambling a ridge.Pause to viewfest
the peaks:
Ossa, Cradle, The
Walls,Frenchman’s
perhaps – weather willing.
Weaveskirt the
boulders, the gumscrub,crossfooting
contours, downthrough a garden
of windelled heath.Springstep on
sphagnum but veervoidcushion plants –
venerant ancients.
Softing (still
west) over sedge,
sightlock two
tarns to your right.Wendal the
forestful hill,then drop to a
blackdeep lakeand airbed across
it. You’re there.
The poems in this collection leave me with the
experience of having read something genuine, whole, complete, achieved without a
striving for effect. The poems simply ARE. As landscape is. And that can be
fierce. Take this striking poem about
the aftermath of a fire:
J K MURPHY
Anonymity
His is a summer
hamlet struck
By spry lightning
And wind-fed fire
And he retrieves
from ash
What
stark-stubborn chimneys comprise –
Masses of bricks,
clinging:
A settlement of
them.
Each neighbour
bills his own pocket
And four walls
Will shoulder
life again,
Time willing.
And time is
civil.
JOHN CAREY’s poem, Shunted aside, has this superb portrayal of a young
person’s involvement with their digital device:
… the fine-motor skills in their
slim
fingers put me to shame, I who only learned
to tie a fish-hook at the tenth attempt.
I watch them negotiate the ticket-scan
at the exit gate, their free hands still
texting or tweeting with a desperate
intensity to hold off the hypnotic
snake-stare of an inner life ………..
Talking of snakes here, LORRAINE HAIG and GINA MERCER’s poems give us
almost visceral accounts of encounters with animals
Gina Mercer’s
swamp snake is ...
lying luxurious — all anyhow.
The grace and lap of slowly feeding,
no haste, no chase, no ache-needing,
fig-opulent, skin stretched pregnant,
full-length,
lustrous, joy-tight serpent.
Lorraine Haig’s
red-bellied black snake is …
galvanized on its tail. Its flicking tongue
surely tasting my fear.
Face to face I am struck
by the hard shine of its underbelly.
Someone once told me
if confronted by a snake stand still,
I obeyed
the fists pounding retreat
in my chest and the voice in my ears
screaming flee!
The snake seized the moment
and vanished to the undergrowth.
I am filled
with the sweet fragrance
of the frangipani’s white flowers
and the pink opal of a snake’s belly –
a pale jewel wet and shiny
and my surprise it wasn’t red.
Every poem deserves its placing, none
disappoints, every word counts, none are superfluous, every poem is one I
return to, and that is something I cannot say of many other poetry publications
I attempt to read. I would like to tell you how I generally approach new poetry
publications: it is with suspicion born of disappointment. Most usually I take
the book and let the collection fall open where it will, a kind of game of
chance I play with myself. Practice has taught me that this will often mean I
slam the collection shut and never return to it. But when you have to launch a
magazine you have to read every poem in it and read it very finely. Let me
assure you this was NO CHORE but a sheer delight. Every single poem was a pleasure
to read and I would read them all tonight to persuade you to buy it but then
you might not having heard it all. Is it enough to say that at no point did I
get what I sometimes get, a feeling of rising disturbance, an unsettling
distaste that I cannot explain? But here, it is an instant locking in, locking
onto … and a returning and returning to the poems; curiouser and curiouser said
Alice.
So where did the pages fall open when I first
opened this edition? My landing point was Leanne Jaeger’s poem, ‘Naked:
My piano has a pulse.
Black seams breathe in and out,
a mouth baring its teeth –
you make them gleam.
Your naked music,
the wild mechanism that is you –
nothing more real than this.
Real. How interesting to do business with the real in
the rather surreal art form of poetry making.
Here are some more snatches from the poems to
tempt you: from ANNE MORGAN’s 'Pedra
Branca and Eddystone Rock':
Beneath a bruising moil of thunderclouds,
kited with mewling albatross and gannets,
Pedra Branca could be an upturned yacht
adrift in a turquoise churn of Southern Ocean,
its keel glazed with
guano.
KAREN KNIGHT’s poem ‘Stretching the Heart Walls’ has images that stay
with me long after the reading of the poem
My Scottish cardiologist has told me
my heart is fine. It just skip-hops
and double bounces when I think
of my brother, not much older than me.
All he would have
seen as he fell
from his armchair
onto the floor
was the carpet of
big, blue flowers.
Nothing more.
MAL ROBERTSON also uses language with a solid foundation and linguistic
flare, In ‘Felling pine’
(for timber
gatherers from the West Coast of Tasmania who lived and died at Gallipoli) – If you are one of the poets included in this
collection and I have not singled out your poem please take that as my being
driven by the clock and nothing more.
I have but one regret: that Blue Giraffe is
not bigger. But then, as Chris Wallace-Crabbe has said of poetry, “The books
that contain it are lamentably thin; they fill shelves slowly” (in Read it again, p.49).
Long may Blue Giraffe continue to fill our shelves.
In its quiet way, it achieves an enormous
amount. It has character. Like a good wine. It does not have any flavour of
braggadocio. It carries, like a good voice across a room or across a ravine. Blue
Giraffe is another ball game. Let’s celebrate the achievement of this small
magazine. Thank you again Pete Hay for a fine selection for this edition.
----------- Editorial details --------------
Blue Giraffe is available for purchase at the Hobart Bookshop, Salamanca Place, Tasmania 7000.
Editorial inquiries to Peter Macrow, 6/16 Osborne St, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7005.
Submissions in hard copy to the same address for the next edition, also to be guest edited by Pete Hay.
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