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Book Reviews Martin Langford Sensual Horizon Five Islands Press PO Box U34 Wollongong University NSW 2500 ISBN: 0 86418 699 1 RRP: $16.45 Beatriz Copello Meditations at the Edge of a Dream Glass House Books an imprint of Interactive Publications Pty Ltd Treetop Studio 9 Kuhler Court Carindale QLD 4152 ISBN: 1 876819 97 0 RRP: $19.95 Read together, Martin Langford’s 'Sensual Horizon' and Beatriz Copello’s 'Meditations at the Edge of a Dream' could be viewed as songlines quietly humming and stretching out into physical and psychic landscapes, to masculine and feminine domains, and into the real and imaginary. Both collections are meditations from different voices in Australian poetry. Martin Langford’s poetry has a modern masculine style whose concern in his latest collection is the physicality of landscape and through it the limitations we perceive and the reverence we feel for it. This juxtaposition at the heart of the collection is interesting and works well. According to the back cover of the collection, Langford’s landscapes or “horizons” are ‘full of that nostalgia for the present which is so characteristic of contemporary life’. Through this immediacy life unfolds in real-time through language, poetry, music, politics and observations. In 'Field Poem' (p.3) Langford explores the essence of landscape. The musicality of his language in this poem seems to me to be a love letter or dedication, not only to the field, but to the words themselves, whose letters scatter across the page and create their own horizons through the placing of words: thumbprints of stump-whorl eroding to clay scuffed, fuzzy ridge-lines the bristle and plush of the grasses the nodding of seed-heads: surrender There is an assurance in Langford’s style. Field time is slow and patient but through his urging the reader becomes acquainted with its microcosm of life both formed and forming. In 'Shakespeare' (p.16), Langford explores literary reference and loss as if they too were landscapes formed by a mystical timeline of destinies. Timelines that appear easy to edit or erase the misfortunes of Shakespeare’s heroines: Hermoine, flexing awake; Imogen, setting to one side her mound of fresh flowers… as if he could gather the lost ones – the fair, the three-syllabled: Perdita, Miranda, Marina – and undo, forever the harm… There’s something about this poem which makes these women “flesh”, their shallow breath escaping like mist as each of them awaits their fate. There is immediacy and trepidation in their waiting, of being totally inside the moment. This uneasiness is similar to Beatriz Copello’s 'Meditations at the Edge of a Dream'. Beatriz Copello’s collection is fragile and emotionally more complex than Langford’s and I interpret Copello as an explorer of the feminine. Her vision of the world is made up of more “handle with care” material and explores the fragility of existence and experience. This collection deals with grief, depression, dreams, pain and contemplation, hence the connection to meditation within its title. Through her poetry Beatriz Copello extracts her demons with each carefully chosen word. I feel that her poems should be read in their entirety, rather than through snippets, but in saying this I have chosen two extracts. The first example is taken from a suite of poems 'Our Essences' (pp.32-6), from the sixth poem, 'Our Games' (p.34): Clutching swords and opening doors just traced on walls we collide, tired of waiting for something that will never arrive 'Our Essences' is an interesting tract exploring human behaviour and modern relationships. Through this poem Copello explores the games we play and the impatience that is often felt in modern life. Unlike Langford, Copello brings a touch of magical realism to the moment, a dreamlike moment where the impassable is not a hindrance but rather the things we cannot touch, like emotions and desire. In Conundrum (p.3) Copello again explores this dreamlike theme of existence: It has been like being a seed before being a flower and sometimes like being a flower… Both 'Sensual Horizon' and 'Meditations at the Edge of a Dream' are to be read aloud, slowly and patiently, to allow each word to have its own presence in the world. When reading these collections I was reminded of the Chinese proverb, ‘words are sounds of the heart’, and perhaps these soundings are in fact the songlines themselves.
Five Bells, Winter Edition, 2002
Last updated: 14 January 2004 Copyright © Libby Hart |