The rhetoric of the age is not written in words, but spelled out in the disarray of deconstructed, disembodied bodies.
I had to take a break from reading after the icy finality of “Unholy Trinity”, with its “hope, hope, hopeless” trinity. Fortunately Deane provides a great deal of personal warmth as he moves into the next series, which are more personal and family oriented. There is still pain and grief, but it is shared, loving, and human. The loss of a child is dealt with beautifully, with longing but no self-pity in “Man to Woman,” a poem which takes it cadence and rhythm from Judith Wright’s famous “Woman to Man”:
Who shines the light? Who wields the blade?
You hold me, and I am afraid.”
The poems remain personal, addressing love and loss in a range of innovative ways, including one that places the loss of a child against a de Kooning painting. The voice in this one is almost detached – an abstract impressionistic perspective on stillbirth: “Gave; took. Existed; did not exist.” with only the tiniest italicised voice in the corners of this poem to hint at the personal pain.
The book then moves back outward – into the grand scale of “Creation Myth” which charts the short and deleterious history of mankind, comparing us to worker bees. All of the poems in this collection are tightly and powerfully crafted, using rhythm, and carefully chosen rhyme to drive their meaning. Deane’s use of language is often breathtaking and precise, charting the decline of a life against the decline of a race:
erroneous in our belief that this strait is more than a short walk
from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen to the grave;
a concentric perambulation that contracts year by month by week by day
The second section “Sede vacante” refers to the vacancy of the papal seat. As the section title suggests, there’s a little more irony in this section than the first section. In the first poem “Duyken, 1606” refers to the arrival of the first Europeans on Australian soil. Duyfken or Duyken was the name of the Dutch East India Company ship which had its 400th anniversary in 2006. In this poem, the voice belongs to the earth – “Terra Incognita” and to the Aboriginal people who inhabited it before the Europeans arrived. The irony of the formal, polite address that starts the poem, and the apocalyptic warning of its prophesy works brilliantly, throwing the reader into a confusion of guilt, fear, and self-aggrandisement. The reader is simultaneously placed in the role of aggressor and victim in a way that is both pleasurable and horrible. Again after taking the reader as far as it is possible, Deane pulls back into the intimacy of personal loss that characterises “Driving my mother’s car”. Loss and the missing subject pervade this piece, which is full of the tender bravado of a bereaved son.
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