Judy Johnson

Nomadic

Black Pepper, 2004. 111pp.

Reviewed by Robyn Rowland

Blue Dog. Australian Poetry, vol 3, no. 4, November 2004

There is a deep satisfaction in reading poetry when its craft presents us with an innovative way of viewing imagistic connection, or surprises us with unusual juxtapositions of objects and nature. Judy Johnson invites us in Nomadic (Black Pepper Press, 2004) to journey with her like this, both through time and place, and through threaded images, into the heart of those things that matter to her. At the personal level, there is the end of love; the small child closeted literally in the past; a girl dealing with her father’s death ; her father’s love frozen behind photography and her mother’s passing away. At the political level, there is the poet’s desire to hold up to us our own unjustified dissatisfaction with life compared to, for example, the deprivation and suffering of Africa.

Her first book, Wing Corrections (Five Islands Press,1998) contained well-crafted short poems that used a brightness of image powerfully. In Nomadic, this skill with images has expanded into a mature and more complex form. Often, rather than evoking feeling, the poems strike the reader with awe at the turned image, at the way they clarify understanding. The craft is impressive. Here there are chains of images – lines on a map perhaps – often discrete and seemingly disconnected objects or creatures, that become our trail: their relationship to each other exposed by the poet so that we see them anew, reshaped.

In ‘Girl on a Paling Fence’, we move from the image of the girl balancing on the fence, to her dead father lying in the house, ready for visitors. The experience is woven through a sweep of particulars that draw us into a visual picture of the moment. The girl’s sandals are blue, like the colour of a plastic necklace of her mother’s that the girl once broke and hid, ‘piling its kaleidoscope of/ planets into a box under her bed. Now she threads herself / along the string of fence ...’

We look down at the the girl’s ‘two striped feet with their strapped-in cargo / of toes’. Her mother is drowning in grief : ‘all morning her mother’s / eyes have been brown stones sinking beneath the weight of / water’. The girl has taken objects from her father’s bedside table – a tobacco tin and a pipe: she doesn’t touch ‘the heaviness of the objects she has taken for fear of a similar / drowning’.

She keeps the two apart by the

warmth of a body-width. She measures their coldness this way

as she measures the fence

by the flat spaces where she can place her feet and not by the

spikes that divide them.

Finally, her lonely grief is caught as she balances ‘... the pipe / on one side, tobacco tin / on the other and in the middle, her unlit heart.’

Johnson has a deft hand with nature. I am delighted by the variations on the moon that as a crescent in ‘Excavation’ (‘Nomadic’ sequence) ‘hangs like a pale cheese in a muslin sack’, and transforms into ‘the ghost gum moon’ in ‘Thirty-four years on’. In ‘Going home for her dying’ it becomes ‘that jack-o-lantern / tuber,/ the moon, the colour of pumpkin the only way my mother / liked it. Rind / as hard as charity and inside, the flesh dry as orange dessicated / coral’.

In her hands, the ocean is brim-full of intent, of secrets and of a fever for understanding. In ‘Shipwrecks’ ‘The ocean / mocks the geometric absolutes land aspires to, and surface / becomes another dimension, as the breeeze-pampered sailcloth / of your skin adapts to the heavy press of atmospheres.’ ‘Diving the Westralian coast’ leaves us ‘just suspended at the / border between estrangements.’ In the captivating poem ‘The Way a Lighthouse Knows her Keeper’, it is the inanimate lighthouse made living that holds the keeper above the ‘caw and cackle of ocean’ the ‘colour of that middle-blue Faber / Castelle pencil.’

In another fine poem, ‘Stone’, it is the land that becomes animate as it draws the carvers to itself ‘yearning for transformations.’ ‘Stone predicts in its own time and way’ and as the suicide falls, it ‘is practising its shapechanging’ :

...The faster they fall, the

smoother

and more impassive the face, until those who go this way are

so reminded

of their own elusive god, that in the end the brokenness barely

surprises them.

Johnson knows that she’s playing the line between image and reality; between image and its meaning; between image and feeling, felt and conveyed. ‘Image’ she warns, ‘divides us from who we really are’ (‘Light and skin’). She is at her best when interlocked images flow from her naturally, without expectation. It may fall flat though, when the stretch of the image is overdone and the poem seems to be trying too hard to find that odd juxtaposition which is her forte. In ‘The Giant Statues and the Birdman’ (‘Encountering Easter Island sequence’) the statues are ventriloquists that moan in the wind ‘exhaling warm breath on summer nights / like honey mixed with talc.’ Here the lightness of breath and talc, mix uncomfortably with dense honey, so the line doesn’t succeed for me.

A lot is travelling on those directed collages of image. They frequently set us up for the last significant lines. Nature and animals are often transformed into otherness, our selves in some form, so that we are enticed to anthropomorphize ourselves in order to find the nub of meaning in the poem; in life. In ‘Amphibian’, there is a merging of lover with tadpole/ frog. In ‘Rainforest Bats’ the ‘ghosts of orgasms’ drift from bedrooms to inhabit the bats and their squeaks are ‘our playful pillow talk’. The ‘points of inevitability we pass in / lovemaking acts’, ‘move us towards a larger dying’. The rustling of leaves and bats in the forest leaves us

...unable to decide

if the corresponding flutters we feel

are the beginnings of arousal, or the unfolding wings of fear.

In ‘The African Spider Cures’, a substantial and complex sequence, we are to become the spider , to ‘lurch side to side.../ until you feel the shuffle of fine hair on your legs and back... extend your incisors..’

This sequence takes us wandering through Africa: its colour, its pain, its endurance. We are shown how we weave our discontent while others live life hard. Inside the spider – trapdoor, huntsmen – on the floor of the forest or strung across the river – we are without language and can ‘consider the wisdom of silence’. We are admonished to admit our self-pity, our inner poison, and in our smallness, the animal we have become:

Watch it twist and turn inside the silk it’s rolled in, stuck to

what you are determined it will neither die of, nor escape from

while ever you are so dexterous at weaving discontent. (‘2 Self Pity’)

The web becomes the image of entanglement, of connection, of death, of safety, of buoyancy and of persistence. The web itself is a powerful symbol: when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion, so the Ethiopian saying goes. Spider silk itself can be curative. I’m searching for meaning here. We are I think, left with the poet’s own challenging ambivalence in the meaning of the spider’s cure.

Moving from the creation of a drum from the Baobab tree, as spider we move up into the trees, along the Argungu, thrown from Krakatoa, through Kampala alongside the Masai, into Levubu, Fez, Morocco, Somalia, the Sahara and finally Victoria Falls. All the while, the harsh driving tone of the poet, is making sure we haven’t missed the sharp edges of the journey. And why? To drop our easy self-indulgence, our one-eyed first world vision, while recognising the connections between all things and the web that holds us:

Take it as a sign. Know that there’s nothing else for it, but to

persist.

It’s either that, or stand stiff as a cliff-edge old testament

prophecy

and be eroded just the same, while the migratory world keeps

falling and falling.

In this sequence Johnson also reveals her poetics, her process. In ‘Flying’ in her first book, she wrote:

Not so easy to dismantle the puzzle

and see flying for what it is,

what most things are:

a set of compromises – a series

of subtle wing corrections

to make the pieces fit.

Reminiscent of this unveiling, she writes in The African Spider Cures’:

... Let these images collide, as well as all

those other

childhood antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze

frame, but see

how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so, like

an early

animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the

pages

creating a seamless movie. (1. Disappointment)

This ‘freeze frame’ recurs throughout the book as method and image: in ‘Heat’, ‘Thirty-four years on’, ‘Watching the storm’ ( in ‘Five Poems of Light’). In ‘Photography at Dingo creek, 1967’ the father photographer misses the lived moment to capture it in the camera, ‘her childhood / preserved like the fossil of some sea-going creature .. .to trap her in the infinitesimal shutter-speed wink / between the moment and the moment’s loss.’ Ironically, she is caught too, between the living of it and the recording of it. Yet here is a purpose of poetry: to be the snapshot album of moment.

Interestingly, poems about a girl’s father dying that occur in three poems, speak from the third person. Yet the poem on her mother’s dying is first person direct. In these poems feeling is more strongly conveyed in comparison to the more distanced, yet finely crafted, ‘traveller’ works, through Easter Island, New Guinea, Africa.

Personally, I like to be moved by poetry, and the title sequence, ‘Nomadic’, which captured the sadness of a relationship ending, and the familial poems, are closest to the heart. The ‘Five poems of Light’ for the poet’s mother are deeply moving and loving poems, as Johnson remembers a childhood (‘childhood splinters are working their way out’ we are told in ‘Splinters’) through to her mother’s death. Some of the strongest writing is here, with its crisp imagery, moving narrative and precision of craft. I love the crystalline beauty of ‘3. The Day of the Toboggan – Kosciusko 1973’ and the beautiful flowing lines following a kite outside the hospital window to the inevitable death: her mother ‘hungry all her life’, at the end

... relaxed on the pillow, intent on becoming

the bone

the flesh spends all its life peeling back from in incidental

layers.

Until, by nightfall, the spars shone through, devoid of

unnecessary material: a frame

that the air eventually lost patience with supporting

and plummeted to earth. Leaving nothing

to show she had ever flown except,

in the broken room, still attached,

our long trail of sorrow. (5. Her Last Day)

Rarely does Johnson seem uncertain of what she wants to convey. But with the folding and unfolding of image, there is a risk that purpose outside image might become lost, the poem fading merely into a made thing, an artifact. ‘Heat’ might be one of these, the concluding lines falling diffidently, compared to the wonderful twisted word usage of ‘Splinters’ with it’s ‘lung-thirst of sawdust; a smell of / imprisoned forests and hard rain sifted / from an axe-cut sky.’

I felt that the two sequences following Chinese poetry read a little like exercises in mimicry, detracting from Johnson’s own voice. Line endings seem crucial to me in the creation of the poet’s voice: the voice that captivates; that guides; that invigorates or impassions. Line breaks direct the living pulse of breath, with its essential shadow - stillness/no breath. The breath units of voice drive the rhythm of the poem, which is crucial to the success of free verse poetry. Sometimes movement into varying form on the page enhances the quality of directness in communication of voice.

Johnson wrote in ‘The woman who painted the sky’ (Wing Corrections): ‘ the critics said for years she was too predictable, / painting only one shade of sky’... so ‘in the end she compromised’ – ‘they said her art had come of age,/ but it felt like selling out’ and ‘she never had the dream again where her body/ let go its own blue centre and spiralled / up to light like egg white/ in glass blown air.’

This is always the risk of falling for fashions in form, and Johnson tells us here that she knows it. So I felt disappointed when I read the prose poems. Unpunctuated, they made the inner reader stumble looking for breath, trying to find a flow that was blockaded by an invisible fence. They seemed to lack the energy and intensity of the free verse forms. I was, however, delighted to find such faults, bearing in mind the Persian carpet makers’ belief that flaws have to exist in, or in fact need to be added to, the best of rugs to ensure the weaver will not be struck down for impersonating the perfection of god. Nomadic carries the weft and weave of well-made poetry, and for this, it is a pleasure to read.

Sandy Jeffs

The Wings of Angels. A Memoir of Madness

Spinifex Press, 2004, 100pp

Reviewed by Robyn Rowland

Blue Dog. Australian Poetry, vol 5, no 9, 2006

The wings of angels A memoir of madness, continues Sandy Jeff’s articulation of the spirit and reality of the underworld of the mind that pushes itself into existence through her own schizophrenia; a mental illness she has been living with for twenty-five years. Never romanticising madness, she writes with grit and candour of the dark confusion, the well of suffering inside mental illness, a topic she works with as a community educator. Describing herself as a ‘sanity-challenged’ poet, in all her work Jeffs writes with an astonishing frankness. As she wrote in her earlier book Blood Relations (Spinifex, 2000): ‘If nothing else, I am a survivor. / After all these years / I cannot deny this truth. / I am a survivor!’ On her experience of both madness and poetry she wrote in a powerful prose piece,‘Poetry and madness: a landscape of lunacy’ (Write On, 2000, Vol 11/9) :

‘When the voices and delusions come, I enter a realm of reclusive imagination and invulnerable privacy. There is nothing more harrowing than this wilderness of insanity. There is nothing more devastating than the depressions that throw one into the chasms of the mind’s dark recesses ... Through this chaos my creative urge has been a lifeline that has sustained and enriched my life.’

Articulate and sharp, she has not spared herself in any of this brutally honest writing. In Blood Relations, she wrote about the terrifying experiences of a childhood bludgeoned with domestic violence and alcoholism. The fervour in the first poem in that book,‘Obsession’, might be a mantra, a signature tune, for her earlier work in Poems from the Madhouse (Spinifex, 1993, 2000, 2002), to be followed in Blood Relations, and now in The Wings of Angels. A Memoir of Madness. There is a driven quality about the work, a fierceness based in the angry determination to recreate, to purify, those experiences; perhaps even to have them safely captured on the page. There, after all, lies a form of control.

You weigh heavily on my mind

poems ooze out of me about you

it’s an obsession

I want the world to know

how awful it was

I want to exorcise my bitterness

I want to tell the children I never had

not to do what you did

not to feel as I feel now

not to let anger steel their hearts

you weigh heavily on my mind

and I don’t know what to do

except write poems of love and hate. (‘Obsession’)

Powerful though Jeffs’ story is, however, this is a book of poetry, not biography; and as such, it needs to emerge wrapped in imagery and concision. It must do what is required of poetry: bring the reader into the world of the poem, not just the life of the poet. This is difficult terrain for a poet so tied into her subject matter, as it is, also, for the reader. Only trust in the craft of poetry can armour both for the journey. Because this particular journey will be hard.

Wings of Angels is a sequential journey into the heart of madness with the poet as guide. Disturbing, at times frightening in its creation of the unchained pain of this darkness, the book begins with a struggle between dream and nightmare, but the nightmare vision has the upper hand: ‘I ... wake to the nightmare / of madness visible.’ (‘Mounting the Tumbrel’)

Here is the journey we take with the poet as guide. Beginning in the loveliness of nature and the paradise of tall and golden angels, nature is ravaged by ‘The Hand’ and the poet thrown out of the garden. Taken by a Tumbrel into descent, she is lifted by ‘fleshless hands’ into the vessel to cross the ‘Rogue River’. Here is the first loss – her heart: ‘My heart is dead now / there is no heart to suffer’.

The Pilot of this vessel has seen and heard it all. He ‘denies himself the luxury of guilt’ for his knowledge and occupation. Humour, which Jeffs often uses to relieve, is now enlisted to give us reprieve from the downward slide. At the opposite side of the river waits the three headed monster: Barbie, Ken and Ronald Mac Donald. The poet journeys on through ever-increasing horror, and suddenly we are in the theme park of death - www.underworld.com – with our host – Billy Graham! Eventually, he tosses the poet over and down the walls ‘like a sheaf of wheat’. But we’re still not at the end of the descent as she continues the search for ‘life’s veiled meaning’ through a world she inhabits which is almost indescribable:

No utterance from my parched lips
could begin to describe this place.

Fires burn hard and hot
but nothing seems to turn to ash.

The fierce heat sears my skin
which blisters and weeps

but it does not fall away from my frame
loosely it hangs

bleeding like frayed meat
set upon a butcher’s block.

It is as though I have to feel
the wrath of some tyrant

who likes to torture, but not to kill,
leaving me neither dead nor alive. (‘Into the Flames on the Other Side’)

Here is her second loss: the body itself.

Just when we might feel deluged in horror, Jeffs brings us the raft of dark humour again in ‘God’s body Odour’ and ‘The Song of the supermarket Sirens’. Yet still ‘the wings of angels burn’. In ‘Supermarket sirens’ too, and ‘Tinsel Paradise Lost’, the poet brings her political analysis strongly through the smoke. Commercialisation, the destruction of nature, despair from gambling, are all woven through the satire, ‘Tinsel Paradise Lost’:

In the near past
this place had glittered
a cornucopia of the children of mammon
a pleasure palace of delights.

A tinsel paradise once dwelt here
where machines whirled and rang

announcing a win or loss.
Players with fixed eyes

stared at electronic screens
and ears rang with a tshing! tshing!

all keening for the sounds
of cascading coin.

In spite of references to ancient mythology in the book, there is a bonding thread in Christianity, which simultaneously comes in for a whipping. But here lies a greater irony. The tone, rhythms and voice of the Bible echo through the poet’s own spiritual journey into the heart of darkness. ‘The Tower of Lamentation’ sings with the declarative rhetoric of a Billy Graham, and ‘ Where God is only a word’ is a powerful Antichrist poem, reverberating with the rhythms of the beatitudes:

I come from a Christian culture
bringing my baggage with me
but here where everything
has been turned on its head................

.... God is absent ...

the poor in spirit are miserable
the mourners not comforted
the meek do not inherit the earth
the hungry and thirsty for righteousness are not filled

the merciful do not obtain mercy
the pure in heart do not see God
the peacemakers are called the children of Satan
the persecuted do not reach the kingdom of heaven

This is the land of the empty tabernacle ..............

Here God is only a word,
a word that even Moses stuttered
in a tongue tied tangle of syllables
that parched mouths refuse to utter.

The land we come to is the ‘broken land’ ‘where the music has fallen silent’. There are pits and the voices of the mad, battering the poet with her supposed shortcomings. Voices, hallucinations, ‘those death-croaked monsters of my mind’ berate her: ‘evil bitch, scum of the world, devil, whore’. Wandering through cyberspace, the poet meets finally ‘The Iron Lady’, ‘her crown made of human bones / and dead people’s eyes’. She sets a pack of ghouls upon the poet, to rape her brutally and ‘drive my soul out of my body / leaving me to face this journey / craving./ and ‘without my soul to guide me.’

Here is her third loss: the soul guide itself. Then the poet decries:

Empty inside with nothing to call on
I know this is the end

and the beginning. (‘Where my soul is driven out of my body’)

So, as in true spiritual testing, all must be dropped, left behind, in order to begin the journey into newness. Without heart, without body, without soul, the poet struggles on. And what does she have as companion: a wry humour but most importantly, her craft. Because above all things, without craft, the writing from life is mere therapy. Jeffs has a sustained control of the narrative thread; and the gift of presenting to us a horror beyond our imagining, without oppressing the reader, or leaving us stranded. This is enabling for us; empowering for both poet and reader.

‘How terrible my wanderings / to have to witness this land of burning shadows / Land of weeping women’, she writes and ‘still I have to witness this’. Yes, to be witness to all this is the role of the madwoman. To re–present it to us as poetry, is the role of the poet.

In ‘Where the mad are pilloried’ we hear the poet’s fear. And though it is the fear of the mad within her, it is also the fear of the poet: that everything a poet struggles with, and struggles to represent, still goes unheard. Of the woman being pilloried she writes:

Her imagination is solitary
and in the pillory of madness

she withers away
simply disappears into her own mind

until one day she is gone
and no-one cares.

Likewise in the last poem in the book, ‘The Witness’, Cassandra, whose curse was that she would know truth, speak it, and no-one would hear her, listen, believe her, recites her knowledges – all she has learned. And the poet asks, ‘Am I, Cassandra, the seer / mad again?’ And she could be – just mad. Or mad with understanding; mad with impotence to renew that which has been destroyed; mad with silence.

Yet this Cassandra is not unheard, not unlistened to. Art makes us care. Art is the great liberator. Perhaps the great educator. Within art, suffering itself finds a purpose and nothing is wasted. Without it, all our specialness as individual humans is locked away.

The order of poems in a volume like this is important. It needs to carry its weight while not tiring the reader. If there is a criticism of the book, it lies in the sequence of the last poems. The journey starts to lose energy, as the theme tends toward repetition in ‘The dead tell tales’, and ‘Sexless in this Tormented city.’ The prose poem ‘Postcard from the edge has Jeff’s hallmark black humour ( Club Mad being a send up of Club Med), but because of its prose form, it risks the didactic : ‘everything is for sale.& the soul too – it is susceptible to a virus called information sickness that slowly and painfully liquidates it’.

The Wings of Angels continues Sandy Jeffs’ battle to recreate and present to us, the terrible journeys on the other side of sanity. Unlike the usual heroic search, this tale cannot end simply and finally. As she writes: ‘I have come thus far / and know no end’. (The Dead Tell Tales).

On this journey inside the horrifying and blackly humorous visions of psychosis, the poet tells us early in the book:

I will need many blessings
to illuminate the dark around me
to help me recognise this world
in which I find myself. (‘Crossing the Rogue Rover. 1. Reeking of the dead.’)

It is clear from the dedications in her books, that Sandy Jeffs has close friends from whom she draws love and support. She also acknowledges that most treasured gift, a poetic colleague, to assist in the editing them (particularly Judith Rodriguez and Patricia Sykes). It seems too that poetry sustains her sanity, as it also records her insanity. She has written:

‘In times of distress and pain, whether personal or cultural, we more than ever need the healing powers of poetry. Poetry seeks to peel the layers from life’s distortions and travails, to give meaning where meaning cannot be found. There is an exhilaration in this. Reason seems to be elevated to a new level that goes beyond reason's domain and poetry explores this unknown – some saying it enters a kind of madness. Some also say poetry is the view from the sickroom of life.’

With a powerful and distinctive voice, resistant to her own demons and inner chaos, Sandy Jeffs’ poetry in The Wings of Angels. A Memoir of Madness is clear and concise with no smokescreens of pretence. Held in the tight constraints of poetry, it is directly from the unconscious yet nowhere is there babble. We hear about the babble, we come near to it, but always there is the driving force of intelligence, questioning the reality of delusion and, indeed, the reality of the concrete. Always, there is a powerful, simple and at times Biblical rhythm; a certainty of purpose; and a precision of craft.