… all experience has
its meaning beyond the moment … which is only ever gradually revealed and grows with
the revelation … like desire, like memory, in the dark. The fullness of the meaning
is only to be known by its weight, its power of displacement.
Beverley Farmer
Jan Owen’s Poems
1980–2008 comprises substantial portions of her five previously published
collections along with her most recent, Laughing in Greek, which appears here for
the first time. Because of the generous scope of the book and the constraints of space, in
this review I’ll speak mainly about one of the chief pleasures offered by such a body
of work from a wonderfully accomplished writer – the insight it gives into how
thought- and image-processes unfold and how each collection relates to the next.
I won’t be able to give proper
space to Owen’s conversations in the plant, insect and mineral worlds or to the
sequences, themselves a memorable feature of the work, in which they are found. Similarly,
I won’t be able to do justice to Owen’s use of imagery relating to physics,
mathematics and the experience of space/time, which, used alongside finely-observed
sensual detail, sets up resonances that amplify both sensation and abstraction. The poems
create a kind of fractal effect by juxtaposing the immense and the minute, the near and
the distant.
From the start, Owen announces her
project as one of understanding how art/language gives weight and meaning to experiences
and events by singling them out, articulating and embodying their ‘power of
displacement’ (as Beverley Farmer puts it):
It happened in Physics,/reading a
Library art book under the desk,/(the lesson was Archimedes in the bath)/I turned the page
and fell/for an older man …/Ten years later I married:/a European with cool grey
eyes,/a moustache,/pigskin gloves. (‘First Love: Titian’s Young
Englishman with a Glove’)
This poetry gives us art as a medium
that has the power to bring objects and events to our attention, to make us recognise them
in a way that shifts things about in our world. And though selective, the act of creative
recognition in its very particularity offers something back to the world –
mindfulness as a return of what’s due:
Always a reticent light, the
gratitude of hands,/bathes what the painter claims from time –/this pewter jug, this
glass half-filled with wine –/some payment of our debt,/for in the pouring back and
forth between/the human lust for change and the loyalty of things… /we spill and
waste,/ except in these small worlds …(‘The Little Masters’)
Throughout the work,
‘gratitude’ of this kind is extended with increasing frequency and assurance to
human interactions. Children, siblings, parents, grandparents – all are
re-encountered and recognised as if for the first time:
Do I imagine or recall/her
presence …/Old Ariel peering, fingers/exploring with tremulous care/a baby’s
fretful gums to where/the Everest tip cuts white –/small sepulchre. It lingers/still,
her smiling sigh – the bite/of life. (‘Great-grandmother’)
Blackberry Season, the next
collection to appear chronologically (although, oddly, not positioned next in Poems),
offers recognition and gratitude to a particular time and place. Here, an uninterrupted
sequence examines beginnings in a family, a community, a neighbourhood. And from these
textures and particularities emerges a voice, a subjectivity that can act as a container
for future selves, like the boat described in one of the final poems of Blackberry
Season:
The boat made by the boy/was
painted blue,/bright yellow inside …/This boat has come to hold/a grandfather’s
cuff-links,/a mother’s black-cat charm,/miniatures of a miner and his wife/almost a
century dead …;/itself an heirloom now,/steady as the barque of Ra,/to ferry its
colours into the dark ahead. (‘Clay’)
The childhood of Blackberry
Season gives birth to the voice of Night Rainbows, the collection that was
published next after it. Here, we are in conversation with an adult ‘I’, a solid
presence firmly situated in its mortal moment and able to speak to and about those it
finds there:
The train slowed down/past wispy
trees and geese in grass./I saw three men under the willows …/’Gyere!’
they called to me,/’Come thou!’//It was the first of spring;/breath’s white
word,/forsythia’s gold …/We waved and laughed …/thou and thou and thou,/and
the train passed on. (‘The Border: Southern Hungary’)
Darkened and enriched, there is now
room alongside and within the speaking self for a variety of voices and a new set of
recognitions. The speaker steps into the poems’ arena and learns to tolerate the
tensions of darkness and diversity so as to engage with what is found there. Sometimes
sharply funny, the various voices find their place within the book’s wider
subjectivity, like the central character of the Doll sequence, Juliska,
second-smallest of a set of babushka dolls:
We are not enough grateful to our
guardian demons/Juliska tells me …/Her guardian angels drift off duty/without a
backward look./But six little demons scout around anxiously,/hissing like
static./She’s been swallowed up/by her great-great-great-grandma, I tell
them,/she’s snug as Canopus,/wombed in the past tense of dark. (‘Angels vs
Demons’)
The next collection, Timedancing,
brings a further shift in which the speaker, having entered into experience, examines
moments of recognition and their role in shaping thought and understanding. How can we
engage consciously with experiences that continue to accompany us but whose meanings, of
necessity, change over time? Thought-processes begin to perform a kind of differential
calculus: where the earlier collections measure the weight of events, the question now is
how the experience of weightiness works itself out – what is its momentum?
I saw it years ago./Known at a
glance,/it was like insight,/a keyhole to heaven …/Its two dimensions/turned me drunk
with blue –/I was no more than the Kashan’s waking site …/But memory’s
the bargain of the bazaar./It’s stuck perception –/a slick of past/for which you
thumbprint then …/Faster and faster now,/going nowhere I know,/I’ve a rug’s
blue map for the trip/and habit’s recurring dream:/hurriedly packing/love and sadness
and shame/into the family’s one suitcase,/this quantum of time. (‘The
Kashan’)
The final collection, Laughing in
Greek, begins a new phase in Owen’s project, turning to the language-matrix which
organises consciousness and from which the poetic voice and the events it recognises both
arise. Problems inherent in language/art are identified, beginning with the way it
‘fixes’ what it formulates in the process of embodying ideas. The more powerful
the image, the more resistance it creates to subsequent thought-forms and to
interpretations of meaning that are adequate to later experience. The act of bringing
something into being in language/art displaces that which is not-yet-thought:
Abruptly held at bay by
metaphor,/that masked guardian of the ante-room,/tomorrow’s tenants try to stake
their claim –/concepts craving life, they find no door://You are simply one of us
in denser form!/they tell the latest metaphor – the sign/NOT IN on the wall of
thought … (‘Ante-room’)
In the long poem ‘Travelling
Towards the Evidence’, Owen examines this role of metaphor in determining which
events and experiences are recognised as meaningful and how they will be interpreted.
Widening her reflection on origins, this time Owen identifies not family but culture,
understood as the product of a system of metaphors, as that which determines how meaning
will be assigned:
We start with nothing/but
darkness older than bone//and a couple of leftover maps,/some purpose lighting us
down…/ Down onto loose sand/where another man’s creed/may be your grit in the
craw,//or glimpsiest chiffons of God/bankrupting the one you were./Neptune sextile Pluto
sets its seed/as prayer’s cross-section –// a star-fruit, say, or the
pomegranate’s/packed congregation./A flower will open on sheer fall,/says Anna
Mezzanotte, ironing lace.//We travel towards such evidence/trace by trace,/backwards, with
our luggage/of lessening light … (‘Travelling Towards the Evidence’)
Each of us, the poem suggests,
labours to bring forth our own nuanced understanding of the world, always in hindsight,
through experiences that are of necessity directed by the cultural ‘maps’ we
inherit. Writing/reading is a vitally important part of the process of updating the maps,
since language is all we have to articulate the next necessary thought that may steer us
away from wreckage and towards the mindfulness that is our only hope. Jan Owen is a
traveller who brings news of places where the maps have failed, and her precisely-imaged
and cogently-thought poems create breathing space for us all. Poems 1980–2008
is a landmark.
Reference list
Beverley Farmer. The Bone House.
Sydney: Giramondo, 2005.
Angela Rockel lives and
works in Cygnet, south of Hobart. Her work has appeared in various journals and magazines.