which the author’s name and book’s title are superimposed. The title, from the Wajarri language, means “my mother,” the author tells us. What are the implications: Is Nganajungu Yagu to be a book of tragic travelogues undertaken in mostly lost indigenous tongues, Charmaine Papertalk Green versing and traversing brutally colonized lands? Or does the code-mixing in this book (between Wajarri, Badimaya, and English) imply language as a portmanteau, comporting disempowerment for indigenous language users in epistemically violent colonial contexts? Or is this writer working interlinguistically against inheritances bequeathing disconnection in a monoculturally imperialized place, as if to send an epistle issuing a set of instructions on the means by which Aboriginal Australians might fight back against a version of “Australia” that historically and systematically displaces and dispossesses indigenous peoples? In her preface, the author explains the book’s cover image, the letters from forty years ago sent to the poet by her mother “protected in my red life-journey suitcase. . . . [The book is] inspired by Mother’s letters , her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture.” Nganajungu Yagu is spliced with fragments from those letters, to which the poet responds in short bursts of autobiographical nonfiction, and this structure enables her to divest poems that speak of a family drama constituted within an overtly and infrastructurally racist Australia. Papertalk Green guides readers through often tragic scenes of forced institutionalization, domestic violence, eviction , poverty, substance abuse, and welfare dependency, but, throughout, her mother’s letters show how “being grounded includes strong connection.” Despite the systemically organized impoverishments her family confronts, they nonetheless remain bonded , and therein this book remains a work of unbroken fealty, a powerful statement attesting not only to oppression but, despite it all, prodigious hope. Papertalk Green makes clear she is writing “during invasion,” and these texts are Books in Review Ciaran Carson From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2019. 208 pages. FOR THOSE READERS somehow unfamiliar with Ciaran Carson’s poetry, these selected poems, chosen from thirteen books and presented in chronological order from 1976 to 2014, will provide an almost dizzyingly fast-paced tour of his essential work. More than any other poet in recent times, Carson’s poetic style changes dramatically from one phase of creativity to another. Were it not for certain consistencies in voice and topic, one could even wonder if all these poems were written by the same poet, so dramatic are the formal evolutions encountered in rapid succession. From beginning to end, however, Carson’s preferred method of conveying stance and “meaning” is consistent , using gesture and suggestion rather than declaration, achieving resonance through careful description and scrupulous diction. In his earliest books, Carson (1948– 2019) writes poems detailing the Troubles in Belfast. Without taking any particular overt stance on the conflict other than that implied by his focus, he uses a language of partial disclosure to evoke the psychology of that time, narratives that carefully allow the readers in while keeping them out with a certain level of secrecy and evasion. The language could be that of the hushed, clipped language of IRA soldiers huddled together in an English bar. For example, consider these lines from “Last Orders”: “Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but / It’s someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens . . . / . . . The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp— / Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks daggers at us / From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how easy it would be for someone / Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and ourselves, to Kingdom Come.” Typical of this period also is the use of irony and grim humor as in the title and first lines of “Belfast Confetti”: “Suddenly as the riot squad moved in it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion / Itself.” Such long—almost prosaic—lines that confront the right margin of the page characterize this period. Then, in 1993, with the book First Language and on through...
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Jul 28, 2024
Yajie Guo + 4
Open Access
