In welcome/no vacancy, Five Islands—in what I believe is the final series of New Poets—introduces the work of Ella Holcombe in book form. Born in 1982, she is ahead of the curve for getting a first book out in Australia, where there is no shortage of poets vying for the attention of publishers willing to touch poetry. This book, and a short stack of newer poems, attractively arranged in a makeshift chapbook, recently arrived in my letterbox.

Holcombe is a poet of the ordinary—but it is the ordinary transformed. In the newer work she sent me—all prose poems—the perspective of the poems is foremost: two poems entitled “From above the earth”, as well as, among others, “From the porch” and “In the pines.” These titles angle the poems such that the details she chooses from the milieu she portrays take on an almost disembodied quality.

“In a small cabin in the woods a man is nearly finished fucking a woman who may or may not be his wife when he hears a knock at the door.”

Setting the scene from her omniscient position “above the earth,” the objects of the cabin impinge on the narrative, which becomes almost secondary, as the attention shifts to the cabin—

“Between the man and the turning doorknob there is a bundle of newspapers tied with string, one skating shoe, a tine of paint a roll of canvas. As the doorknob turns one final time the man will build a raft from these things.”

The poem—as is the case with many of these poems—has a stop-time effect. The turn of a doorknob, normally a quick action: yet here the narrator and the man survey the scene. It slips into the surrealistic with the mention of the raft. The debris of the everyday is transformed. These newer poems are full of such debris, alongside the patchwork of memory. Between portraits, there are poems that seem a continuation from the work in welcome/no vacancy that introduce a more direct perspective: “I,” “we” are interlaced with the outside view.

In welcome/no vacancy the reader sees the seeds of the concern with the ordinary that, on occasion, blossoms into the surreal. Here most of the poems are lineated, though a few prose poems are slipped in too. Given the more recent abundance of prose poems, I’m interested that this direction is not the primary form of her first book, but is a looming presence in it.

The book has a beautiful design—from the cover image by Bill Emory, which accords perfectly with the title, to the bio which in itself is a willed perspective:

“Ella Holcombe was born in 1982 and spent the first three years of her life in a caravan in the wilds of Kinglake. It snowed and her grandmother worried that Ella would perish.

“She didn’t.

“Ella now lives in Brunswick (VIC) with a bunch of stray boys and a large orange snail.”


This whimsy, on the front inside flap, carries into the poems. (I’ve said it before, but I’m so glad this these books have perfect binding and better design principles than earlier New Poets Series.) Emotion is mediated by the domestic scene, as in “Flying at the wind”:


and I couldn’t believe
you were leaving

back at the house we fed the chooks
collected the eggs, drank black coffee
toast thick with jam


In other poems, Holcombe experiments with form—the narrative poem “Dictionary” includes word collisions (“onehundredandone”) and her own punctuation to indicate dialogue with:


/not gonna be in those books anyway but / she says / they’re not dirty books/

she grins a half grin
/dirty retarded bitch/ she says


Some poems aren’t successful in their entirety, though all offer points of interest, and the promise of future work—the newer poems do start to fulfil that promise. One poem that does strike me is “Seven reasons for leaving you.” This title could indicate an emotional-laden piece—yet Holcombe swerves from that, only allowing a sense of suffocation to slip into her second reason (“My heart stopped beating/ I remembered how to breathe”). In the rest (and why is it that seven is such an attractive number to me? Perhaps its Empson and Kundera that have won me over…) the “you” of the title seems almost incidental, the reasons wilfully light—for instance “A grey-hatted man was talking loudly/ about telecommunications.” The form of couplets seems to suit Holcombes sensibility, and the list form adds to the whimsy of her reasons.

The New Poets series is, besides, something of a testing ground—at a limit of 32 pages, these books hover between chapbooks and full-length collections. A good number of New Poets poets have become integral parts of the Australian poetry scene—MTC Cronin and Peter Minter in particular exemplify the successes of New Poets. Nonetheless, there have been a large number of misses with the series too. It has been a laudable endeavour, though many poets have bypassed the New Poets route with their first collections— Kate Fagan, Luke Beesley, Aidan Coleman, Jaya Savige to name a few. I wonder if, in reality, New Poets has often brought out collections from poets who are, in reality, not quite ready for a complete collection?

That aside, I’m glad they’ve given Ella Holcombe a start, and with her precocity, I’m looking forward to reading more of her work soon. Perhaps that’s the best indication of the success of the collection? I’m intrigued to see what comes next in her development.

Recently a couple of chapbooks came my way. See below for a review.

etherdome press, run by Elizabeth Robinson from Boulder, Colorado and Colleen Lookingbill from San Francisco, California produces chapbooks featuring the work of poets who have not previously published a book or chapbook. Two titles for 2008 are Anne Heide’s Specimen, Specimens and Renata Ewing’s double-bill flip-chapbook (start from either end) Somewhere Near West of Ideal and Frankenstein Poems. Chapbooks often work as a testing ground for material, and both these books seem to fit that mode. etherdome's productions are simple yet attractive.

Anne Heide lives in Denver and edits the poetry journal CAB/NET. In her chapbook Specimen, Specimens she presents pointillistic poems—the presentation of some of the verse in this collection echoes this approach to language such as the enigmatic first series of poems, such as the in the opening lines of “Specimen”:

Finger stuck in the sky          if there is nothing for me here

to capture, there is nothing       for me here.

From these relatively structured lines, Heide’s verse seem to break down into parts and singular utterances, such as:

   A bloom                        pours
 
out of the sound         I’d spoken.
 
 A little tragedy.            A fringe on the end of it. 

 An upright               recognition.

(Apologies for the imperfect formatting...)

Evocative as this verse can be, it is also difficult to grasp at moments: such that it is difficult to ascertain if the poet intends the opening seven pages a single poem or a series. There are nice effects achieved in these pages, but this seems to be a poetry in the realm of Gertrude Stein: these words collide to make meaning; I can’t help but feel that this meaning is abstracted. Fringed tragedy, upright recognition: sometimes these abstractions leaving little for the reader to grasp.

In the second series of poems, “Specimens” Heine’s working method is contracted into smaller spaces, so concise it becomes elliptical. Small boxes of justified text, dated as if diary entries, lie alongside more traditional poems. The dated texts strike me as somewhat more successful, if only because they seem distillations of emotional information. Phrases such as “Out from my mouth is a map I’ve/ drawn hoarsely, split in half” create feeling, and Heine’s craft is obvious —but I do wish there were something concrete here to hold on to. Without an anchor, they seem ephemeral.


Renata Ewing’s poems create narratives: her Frankstein Poems draw on Mary Shelley’s work, while Somewhere Near West of Ideal draws on her family heritage to create a sonnet sequence. While overall the Frankenstein poems are a more successful collection, Somewhere Near West of Ideal contains the very good poem “New Year 2007” which opens

Undetected, he slipped back to white wine.
But when the malignant nodule lurking
like an alien egg beneath his skin
was found, he launched into full-time boozing.

Here Ewing is not so intent on perfect adherence to the sonnet form she has chosen (Shakespearean), and her half-rhymes contribute to the cohesion of the whole. The mixture of medical terminology, colloquial language and the sense of the “alien” that we feel about disease is beautifully balanced here.

In the other poems of Somewhere Near West of Ideal, Ewing is not so successful. I sense that in her adherence to the iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet, she cannot loosen up sufficiently, and a series of end-stopped lines undermine the effect. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t tap into the same emotional intensity when writing of her more distant relatives as when she addresses her father, whose memory the collection is dedicated to.

In Frankenstein Poems she is more successful, hopping into the narrative of Frankenstein, writing from the voices of the stories, writing outward to Mary Shelley and including a portrait of Shelley in Geneva. Her forms range from tight 3-syllable line structures to dense longer lines, and the subject matter of Shelley’s novel seems to provide her with a freedom not evident in many of the poems of the other collection included here. In “Creature to Justine (at the gallows)” she finds a slower speed in a string of single syllable words, “Twelve thing tones the church clock strikes, death’s flat chords” while in “Elizabeth” the pace quickens, with words broken over lines:

To succeed
at ambi
tion or e
vil? Of which
am I ca
pable?

The series ends with the best of all, her “Creature (alone in the Arctic) who tells us “I hunger/ hunger, still.” These poems display Ewing’s potential, and do leave the reader interested in seeing more.