Negative Capability

Spring has arrived in the suburbs of the metropolis. There are school girls sitting on our nature strip conversing at dusk. The nymphs and gardeners have been diligent. Peach trees are covered with pink blossoms and the magnolia we cut back last year has flowered thickly in dark, opium-scented maroon. Abundant species of wattle cross-pollinate, colouring the freeway, north and south.

In my semi-sedate state, after dropping Tegan off at school, I flew to Brisbane last week for the Queensland Poetry Festival, where among the highlights were readings by Andrew Taylor, August Kleinzahler and performances by Emily XYZ and her partner. I was there to receive a poetry award, and I think it all went well enough. It was nice to have a few hours alone to write in my hotel room, which surprised me with its brash vista of plazas, appartments, cranes, billboards advertising condoms and the cropped foliage of palm trees. And it was fun getting dressed-up formally, curling my stubbornly straight hair, before stepping out into the Valley’s balmy night and heading for the Judith Wright Centre, a revamped industrial art space, which has a great vibe. I got to meet the poets Bronwyn Lea, Felicity Plunkett and Graham Nunn, whose work I really admire.

Half-way through the announcement I realised I had brought the wrong poem with me, having entered two. It was a funny and arbitrary moment, which I recall slipping away quite perfectly, proving and disproving Murphy’s indefatigable law of errors, and the notion of impermanence I am forever failing at learning to absorb. May the goddess bring me rest, if not restylane.

Bombala Track
Rex Irwin Gallery
38 Queen St
Woolhara
24 August -September 18

One of the country’s most exciting abstract painters, Brett McMahon exhibits his latest series Bombala Track at the Rex Irwin gallery in Woolhara this month. McMahon’s organic style imbues the inanimate subject with new vitality. His work has progressed from industrial surfaces and textured urban landscapes to coastal environments. His art derives from seemingly insignificant details the eye catches, which resonate with perspective and emotional intensity. Fluidity and strength are features of his genderless style.

Bombala track explores the tensile linear narratives of the paperbark swamps and bush reserves at the southern end of Dudley beach in Newcastle, where McMahon lives with his young family. The track with its coastal lagoon is a favourite walk for the artist. He describes the process of drawing from the natural formations and serpiginous patterns:
“I was in the bush every couple of days drawing and experiencing the bush directly through different light and weather conditions. I find the time I spend in the bush rewarding and I always return to the studio with something new to paint.”

Sketched in ink the lines of trees, trunks and branches are transcribed on to heavier watercolour paper using tools such as brushes, scrapers, pencils, oil sticks. McMahon is known for his manipulation of canvas, bringing to life the weathering and embedding of landscape. The interwoven trunks balance energetic shape with sobering tones. McMahon’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally in private and corporate collections and galleries.

On Tuesday night I read poetry with Andrew Lansdowne at The Gods Cafe in Canberra. Among the welcoming poetry community, fostered over the years by Geoff Page, was Isobel Hannan, a close friend of Tatjana Lukic’s. The date of the reading happened to coincide with the second anniversary of Tatjana’s death. A Croatian born writer, Tatjana’s life journeys pitted her against the traumas of war, migration, family disruptions and cancer, to which she eventually succumbed. I read the poem “Joy,” in memory of Tatjana.

When we last met, on 20 June 2008, I was touched by her humility, her humour and her passion for living. We shared a meal of home-cooked soup, we drank Turkish coffee and smoked one or two Camel cigarettes in her garden. Eastern spinebills were feeding on nectar, and blue wrens darted about the fernery at the front of Tatjana’s house. The poplars were late in their golden-leaf, before winter’s dramatic fall. We spoke of her hospital admissions, her family, her writing, the tiredness and forgetfulness from which she was suffering as a result of her treatment, the side-effects of her bloated moon face and hair loss. Despite the seizures and falls she was experiencing, the lapses in consciousness, despite living alone in her home in Yarralumla with only rudimentary emergency support, she was busy sewing curtains, trying out scarves and wigs, painting in pastels, matching the days of the week to colours:

“so, see how i see them ( no idea why), and tell me how you see them
(days and their colours). it’s interesting to know:

monday blue
tuesday brown
wednesday green
thursday red
friday purple
saturday orange
sunday yellow”
(from an email to the poet, joanne burns : 30/7/08)

She loved most to cook for her friends. And what seemed most vital to her then was to continue to edit and complete her manuscript. Tatjana’s spirit bore witness to the Noble Rider that Wallace Stevens wrote of, her poetry affirming “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Yet her language was not one of the aesthete or the conspicuously private, responding ironically and empathetically to cultural and historical realities. The poems were to be published soon after her death in the superb collection La La La, which won the Canberra Critics Award in 2009.

Tatjana could not speak English when she and her family arrived in Australia as refugees from the Balkans war. She described writing poetry in English as “one of the hardest and most challenging things” she had accomplished. She had won several national awards for her poetry collections published in the former Yugoslavia.

photograph by David Cahill 2.9.07: Reading at Poetry Without Borders

TATJANA LUKIC
25 August 1959 – 10 August 2008

Cave Rock Creek, Lamington National Park

After the city we drive to a cabin in Lamington National Park, which I remember for its blue scarps, its antartic beech, ironbark orchids and waratah sunsets. I remember a few years ago, feeling stranded, my daughter burning with a fever and unable to walk. I remember carrying her through the rainforest, the flame kurrajongs and back to the carpark. A mentally retarded boy had wandered off from his group. The teacher’s assistant found him crouched low in the bush, playing with a stick in the dirt. There is something alien and hard and empty in this wilderness.

All day I feel paralysed, observing the hierarchy of birds. Knife-sharp magpies skitch the pink galahs, who crane their necks to crack open seed. Before them the rainbow lorikeets. A sequence of flights measures time, and time intersects with travel. I am interchanging the past for the present tense, chapter by chapter. I am testing words as they retract into something shiny and dangling, and almost whole. Splitting the kernel of words bursting with new taste, I call this life because it feeds me, or as a friend says, What else can one do? When David and Tegan drive into town, I fall asleep and never want to wake. I must be exhausted by worldly things or else immeasurably content, seduced by wave-forms of wing-scatterings and the broken, uneven light.

Next day we try to climb inside the cave rock; in the heat of midday the entrance is a cleft, bewilderingly narrow and too steep for Tegan. Coming downhill she trips and wants a band-aid, her cries echoing in the forest. We have locked ourselves outside the cabin and she is sore. Inside, it’s Technology with a capital T to the rescue. She plays her nintendo for a peaceful hour or two. I love hearing the sound of her sweet voice calling the names of those playful and obedient electronic pups.

There are pademelons in the tall grass bent over bark and berries. I walk along the creek late afternoon, and spot the mottled figure of a platypus in the sand flats. Moonlight floods the valley spilling over fields of rye. Soon a few stars appear in the sky. Pine, citrus and manure stings the air. The nothingness fills me. I walk back over the cold gravel to the cabin and to the fire, with its dancing roses.