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- KEVIN BROPHY
Launch of The Ghost Poetry Project
by Nathan Curnow
Puncher & Wattman, Glebe NSW, 2009. rrp
$21.95
The first poem in this new and startling book
is sub-titled, ‘Why I am sleeping at ten haunted sites’. This poem promises to
answer only one question we could put to this book and in any case it is a slyly
misleadingly worded sub-title because of course the point of each of these night-time
visits was not to sleep. The point was to watch, to listen, and to be a living
antenna for the forces of either the human imagination or a world beyond the physical one
we are so deeply embedded in, to use a term that has gained a certain military infamy
lately. ‘Why poems?’ We might also ask. ‘Why Nathan?’, ‘Why
now?’, ‘Why ten places?’, ‘What is the connection between ghost and
poetry?’, ‘Is this some kind of gimmick being sold to the naïve and curious
reader?’ … the questions could go on, but the fact is that this is an inspired
idea for a book.
All poems are of course haunted rooms. We know
this, and we keep returning to them for their presences, unstable and mysterious as they
are. And the longer a poet lives the more haunted their poems can become. Nathan, however,
is a young poet and his poems are new things with fresh faces, staring at themselves in
the mirrors of the reader’s eye, trying to make sense of the shapes that life and art
can take. His first poem begins with adventurously long lines, each one tipping
dramatically to the conclusion of its thought or image at the beginning of the next line;
and near the end of the first stanza, there is that nostalgic childhood call for
misfortune to allow us a truce: ‘barley’. This poem begins with the mechanical
bunyip at Murray Bridge halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne.
The bunyip, according to the Oxford Dictionary
is a fabulous monster of swamps and lagoons (of Aboriginal origin). Bunyips grow fat and
monstrous on the fantasies of childhood imaginations. When Nathan was a child, he slept in
a manse on the edge of the town of Pinaroo in the Mallee territory on the North West
border of Victoria. The house was nestled against the town cemetery where his father, a
minister, buried many parishioners.
A minister of religion is a writer and a
performance artist. It might come as no surprise that Nathan’s father was a Tivoli
mime artist before he became a minister.
The manse where the child Nathan slept made
many noises at night. He would wake, and know that in the darkness of his bedroom a
creature hovered over him so close he dared not make a noise or even breathe for the
monster would do something truly horrible to him if it heard him. He had one chance to
call his mother then his mouth would shut and his heart would go haywire. If his mother
heard him, and she mostly did, she would go to him and hug him through the worst of his
night paralysis, bringing him back from that place where the wild things are. Not exactly
back home, because, uncanny truth, the monster resided in the family home. My guess is
that most of us have experienced something like this in our childhoods. Nathan’s
parents ordered from Adelaide a special poster of Jesus, which was placed on his bedroom
wall from where it protected him well enough to get him through those years in the
creaking manse. Could a house make all those noises by itself? Surely not. In his
childhood the presence in his bedroom had no name, but in this book it becomes the Butcher
who is the waiting dark. These night visitations only stopped happening when the family
moved from the manse. He was fifteen then, and he has yet to return to spend a night in
that childhood house.
But returning is what the book is about, for
these poems re-visit those nights and those fears which he remembers had been triggered by
the mechanical bunyip at Murray Bridge, the one that will loom up out of the water at you
if you put a coin in its slot. It was this same bunyip that frightened his daughter,
Scarlet, at the time he was conceiving his ghost project. Scarlet became afraid not just
of bunyips, but of the word too, until she head someone say, ‘Bunyips only eat
avocadoes’. If The Ghost Poetry Project has a sub-title surely this is it.
These poems follow the path of a year’s
journey round Australia to ten haunted locations but they reach back, too, to his family,
and there is a parallel or counter-experience for us to follow through the book as the
poet meets himself as father. His daughter’s fears multiply: ‘and she is scared
of ET … the way spiders manage their legs’.
Nathan’s words in this book are agile,
never overlong, always crisply dressed in neat T shirts, tight jeans and sporty shoes.
They take up all sorts of positions on the page happily enough and never really get out of
syntactic order because they have an inner sense for making sense. They are highly
professional and well choreographed. They’ve embraced the fact that this is free
verse, but they know who is in charge. You get the impression each one of them has been
put through a testing audition. In his wonderfully insightful and droll essay called
‘Writing’ which he wrote at the age of 55, W. H. Auden suggested that ‘to
keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in
progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive child, a
practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by
all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who
considers all poetry rubbish.’ These poems from Nathan Curnow are a quality act, each
one pitched to us in a performance honed at his desk with his own Censorate hard at work.
Among them, I am sure, a preacher who was once a vaudeville mime, and a family that would
have liked him to be sleeping at home more often, for while Nathan was hanging out with
the dead his wife Kerryn was growing a new baby, Alexis, who made it into this world in
time to be there on the dedication page to this book. Mid-way through the book, which I
guess was mid-way through the year, she announces she is pregnant with ‘our
fourth’ and Nathan announces this with poem titled ‘Anxiety’. Poems,
travel, sleep deprivation, baby, ghosts—what a year.
We learn that only four per cent of the
population report apparitions.
Even with his well trained, youthfully
energetic, rap-savvy and self-confident words strutting their stuff through these poems,
mysterious tones and unlikely moves do still creep in—under Nathan’s
approval—and we become unsure, for instance, what it is about the tiny bottle of
shampoo left in the hotel room or whether there really was the sound of a collapsing man
in the room where Ben Chifley suffered his massive heart attack or how exactly to read
that word ‘shining’ at the end of the poem, ‘Prior Knowledge’. Nathan
writes, he writes, ‘suspicious of the craft’. With free verse, as with ghost
watching he must remain ‘open to whatever comes’ (from ‘this Knot’).
Of all ten locations, the one where Nathan
faced most directly the return of his childhood night paralysis was at Old Adelaide Gaol,
perhaps the most haunted place in Australia. Forty-five people were executed there, the
last in 1964. Nathan was taken on a five-hour tour of the buildings and grounds by a guide
who was writing his own book, he said. He saw the hanging tower, the old gaol, the
cemetery and the New Gaol built in 1879. As he stood speaking to his guide there was a
sudden noise on a stairway above them , a stairway blocked by a locked gate. It was like a
cane being struck on a ballroom floor. Insistent. They went looking around and returned to
this place two more times. Each time the knocking started up again. The guide showed him
video clips of orbs of light and shadowy figures in the passageways of the gaol, then left
him for the night in a cell.
In these Old Adelaide poems you will meet Clink
the gaol cat, a shuddering fluoro light, cheap mannequins impersonating hanged prisoners;
Nathan will enter briefly the mind of Elizabeth Woolcock who was executed in 1871 for
poisoning her abusive husband. She goes to her death under a ‘hood to hide the
bruising’. After such a night Nathan is taken like a condemned man to the death of
his own sleep.
As we move from location to location with the
poet, we become aware of the way this history has become part of a down-at-heel tourist
circuit, each place coming to us with its own version of a ‘fascinating colonial
history’ and doubtful accommodation. Waiting for a ghost all night can remind you of
the year you had nothing published (‘This Knot’). At Picton, where Emily Bollard
was rammed through a train tunnel in 1916, he does see the lights of a train coming at
him, along with a group of tourists seeking ghosts. They all fall to the dirt to avoid
being plowed through. Later, in the dark in the tunnel there are ‘sounds like a
conductor punching tickets’ (from ‘Ghost Train’).
We are reminded too that this country was built
upon a history of slaughter. Though we have had no civil war, there has been a sustained
violence in our past. It takes poets, novelists and historians—those devotees of
disciplines outside the normal economy to keep looking back at the meaning of this
history.
What we get in these poems are the feelings,
the way memories can mingle with the present when fear is upon us, the associations that
poets are on this earth to make for us. He will chain himself to the night (‘Bunyips
2’), at Richmond Bridge he watches ‘a crusade of light on stone’ (from
‘Postcard from Richmond Bridge’), he will run ‘for the street-light’s
skirt’ (from ‘Still Night Jesters’). The poems come at their subject matter
at a tangent, as the armies of Alexander the Great would move towards their surprised
enemies; and sometimes the poems flee from their subject matter in all directions like a
flock of frightened ghostly cockatoos.
So we are not just gulping down the chilly
midnight ambience of haunted territories again and again. There are hard edges of cynicism
here, a plain sighted observation for instance that always when there are creatures
involved in these ghostly occurrences they are introduced species. There are phantom dogs,
black cats, a spooky goat. But there are no evil brush-turkeys or ghoulish magpies because
the stories, like the story tellers, have been imported (from ‘Introduced
Species’). How haunted, I wonder, are the sites of Aboriginal massacres, and how
painful would we find these places to be if they became tourist destinations?
Nathan spent a night lying in a haunted hearse.
Like a true confessional poet he admits to the truth about that night. He fell asleep. But
his recorder reveals what seems to be a short, breathy phrase, which a sound engineer
isolates for him. It is spoken urgently into the ear of the listener, clearly a
consciousness here trying to get a message through. You will find the report of this
message on page 81of the book, quickly followed by another bunyip poem to his daughter,
apologizing for the road-trips, promising to tell the story of them one day, but
confessing he has become ‘disappointing to meet in person’ because he has become
stranded in his poems. The ultrasound photo, ‘a remarkable smudge’ of their new
baby is the nearest he comes to seeing a ghostly figure.
The book closes with his visit to Port Arthur
and the Broadarrow Café. He sleeps in the nineteenth century parsonage among more stories
of ghosts, reporting that his children are now texting him fluently, that if there is a
ghost here it will probably mistake him for a ghost. He is lighting up, eager to smoke the
bees in his chest to sleep (from ‘Going Home’).
I have calculated that Nathan Curnow travelled
over 20,000 kilometres during the year of writing this book, covering almost half the
circumference of the planet. The historian, Richard Sennet has calculated that it takes
10,000 hours to learn a craft, with mentoring. That is five years of forty-hour weeks
devoted to learning a chosen craft. I think Nathan would have packed much more than a year
into his ghost-year, speeding his knowledge of the craft he approaches with such
suspicion. I am looking forward to seeing where his pen takes him next, and then next, and
then after that. He is a poet, a performer and a mind worth following.
Finally, Puncher & Wattman are to be
congratulated for producing such a stylish book.