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CA Cranston

                    Launch, Head and Shin

Fuller’s Bookshop, Launceston, 2 pm Saturday 21st August 2004

The back blurb says this is Tim Thorne’s ninth collection of poetry; I can tell you now, this won’t be his last. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but Tim is one old dog that continues to grow and surprise.

I first heard Tim read back in 86 or 87 at Knopwoods. He read a poem about Volvos, which I didn’t care for because (it seemed to me) to essentialise Volvo drivers. But circumstances have changed: I’ve had a chance to glimpse some of the many sides of Tim ... and I no longer drive a Volvo.

Most of us know that Launceston’s resident poet was a newspaper columnist; initiated the Tasmanian Poetry Festival; ran Cornford Press, publishing poetry and knowing it wasn’t going to make money; was active in the visual arts, and hospital programs; has been successfully funded by Arts Tasmania for numerous programs that benefited groups of people you won’t find at book launches, and is currently a prominent member of NOW We The People, a group active in political process.

Poets are wordsmiths. Tim’s more. He’s a keen linguist, once a teacher of Japanese and German. As readers we should be mindful of verbal playfulness with a political edge, as, for example, ‘... Deutschland uber Alles ... drowns out Bach’: ‘bach’ is also a river.

That kind of multi-lingual word play is one of the brain-stretching experiences that you’re in for, from this humble ‘retiring’ man (Tim’s given up the Directorship of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, no longer writes for the Mercury, and has published his last Cornford Press book).

There are four parts to this collection: the first is new work; the second, titled, ‘aUStralia: the recent history of a small continent in 22 poems’ has a little of the Peter Seller’s ‘The Mouse that Roared’ about it; then, there’s a reprint of The Streets aren’t for Dreamers, which is chock full of social-Get Real-ist issues, and finally, the punning, irreverent performance poetry in the section titled ‘Chrome, Bone & Microphone’ - which contains a poem about a Volvo.

So, to the book. And to the title: Head and Shin, derived from the Richmond Football Club’s ‘Mighty Tiger’ song....

          ‘... Risking head and shin,

          If we’re behind then never mind. We’ll fight and fight and win.

          For we’re from Tigerland....’

Head and Shin: combining the cerebral with the butt-kicker, the scholar with the scrapper; the double-edge of living imaginatively, within the thickness of the skull; or of living vulnerably, on the skin-thin shin. Tim gets ‘close to the bone’ in his analysis of political ‘shin-digs’: his image of ‘LBJ / and his retinue of shepherds and crooks’ (‘Advent: 21: 21 Dec. 1967’ (p. 75) ).

Song, politics, history, religion - But why Richmond football club? ... Why not, say, Collingwood? Rather than ask him, and admit that I don’t get it, I decided the Tassie connection has to do with Richmond saying they’re from ‘Tigerland’.

You see, the first half of this collection has to do with ‘doubles’, and with ‘duplicity’. (Apparently Tim has written as Dorian Laurent, but I don’t think Dorian Laurent has written anything...)

The book’s dedication is startling. It reads ‘to the memory of my two mothers’. As such it bears the imprint of Tim’s family history - honouring his adoptive mother, and also his biological mother whom he met a few short years ago. Such a meeting meant that his status as an only son, changed to that of a man with siblings. He had, all along, been leading a ‘double life’.

So in the poem ‘Mother and Son’ - a title combining the comic pathos of a Ruth Cracknell / Garry McDonald sitcom, contains a situation reminiscent of Michelangela’s ‘Pieta’, but with an antipodean reversal - the son, holding the mother, writes:

          Holding on isn’t always everything. Skin slides.

          Too tough to die, too proud to call this living,

          You hug into these punctuated hours

          Our missed half-century of love. (p. 43)

The aging son faced with the image of an alternative childhood - it could be sentimental but Tim avoids sentimentality and goes for the whip in the tail, the kick on the shin.

The poem ‘For My Father’ begins:

          My friends are writing elegies for their fathers.

          I have so much to say about you, and memories

          Have nothing to do with it. We never met. (p. 44)

‘You conned me into being’ says the speaker, looking in the mirror to see ‘Your hairline, chin and gait / returned to haunt those who barely mourned,’

The cut and jab of the final line (which I won’t give away) makes this one of the most painful poems in the collection. Although Tim has the market cornered on irreverence, I should add that Tim has a ‘double’, in his dedication to his ‘two mothers’: Tim has been pre-empted by Time, and has a double in a little mouse Kaguya in Tokyo. Named for a Japanese fable, and created from two eggs, the article reads ‘Kaguya Has Two Mums’ (May 5, 2004, pp. 49).

A number of poems are ‘in memory of’ known personalities; and many more are to do with history, a type of ‘collective memory’, where flip-side relationships, lives not lived, continue.

History records that Elvis Presley’s twin brother, Jessie Garon, was still-born. In ‘Chronicles of the King’ (p. 10) Jessie lives, pseudonymously tending bar while ‘apparitions of Elvis’s face / [appear] on tortillas all over the Southwest’.

In ‘Bronte Country’ (p. 26) Branwell is spotted in a Haworth karaoke crowd, a mere shadow of the man who was purportedly the model for the more famous, fictional, Heathcliff.

This erudite collection demanded (for me, at least) a new way of reading: poetry in one hand, Google TM in the other. Take the opening poem, titled ‘Leipzig’:

          Against Honecker’s hoons

          the Gewandhaus was sanctuary.

          Masur stopped the show .... (p. 1)

I confess to ignorance. But collective memory reveals that Honecker (Erich, 1912-1994), was a duplicitous figure, an activist jailed by the Nazis, but a man who grew into his own cruel skin, in charge of the Berlin Wall (1961), and later on the run for his role in East West border killings during the Cold War.

Set that against the sanctuary of the Gewandhaus Otchestra, which made Kurt Masur (July 18, 1927) its first-ever Conductor Laureate, and you have two sides of the human nature exposed in stripped-to-the-bone verse. And while:

          ‘... Irving’s apologia for Adolf

          Proves freedom of speech’

Duplicitous characters share this text with alone, and lonely, characters racing against ‘injustices’, whether it’s the ‘injustice’ of getting old, or of institutionalised silencing:

          A 14-year old girl with

          shoulders as big as all of Prussia

          does lonely laps in water

          clean of chemicals and blood

          against the clock,

          against the clock.

Honecker, Masur, Irving, Adolf: Unnamed and forgotten (she won no gold medals), could this be the American swimmer Shirley Babashoff (b. 1957) who, at the ‘72 Munich Games, was the only one with the courage to speak out against the steroid cocktails of the East German swimmers? It’s a timely poem.

So sport isn’t always cricket, and it makes for a faulty religion; in ‘Lake Eyre Curse’ (p. 74) Donald Campbell takes St Christopher on board the Bluebird.

More traditional icons occur in ‘When the Saints Go Marching Out’:

          Sofya Andreyevna, born when the red day broke,

          Now 75, arthritic, lies on the floor

          Of the Church of the Annunciation.... (p. 6)

‘Annunciation’: means to announce, to speak out. The feast of the Annunciation is March 25th: Tim’s birthday - Tim, charged with ‘annunciating’, is no Gabriel: he plays the devil’s advocate.

In the second ‘series’ titled ‘aUStralia' the recent history of a small continent in 22 poems’ (pp. 53-77) is scathingly anti-nationalist.

‘The Emden’ (p 65) recounts the battles of the German warship when ‘God was umpiring / and even German batsmen walked’. But when the crew of the Sydney dispatched the Emden, ‘down again and again and again long after / the fight’s over’:

          Six months later Gallipoli

          Would make us great losers, but this established

          The national image as nasty winners.

Ulverstone is remembered in ‘Waldheim’ (p. 64) for putting the ‘boot’ in on Gustav Weindorfer, the Austrian who helped make Cradle Mountain a National Park.

And the notion that Chinese like to dine on Australians is captured in ‘Mandarin of the Crystal Button’ (p. 61), in the deliciously named Quong Tart.

Less bloody moments in community history are revisited with the lunatic antics of ‘Jonathan Burke McHugo Comes to Town’ (p. 57). McHugo, posing as a member of the royal family, actually persuades Colonel Gordon of Launceston to surrender his Command. (It’s true - I checked!)

And in a similar vein, in Melbourne, ‘The Mayor’, p. 70):

          When his missus had shot through

          Just before the Duke of Gloucester’s visit

          He needed a lady mayoress for the reception, So hired a prostitute.

I need to close now with the admission that I can’t do justice to this collection. I haven’t discussed ‘The Streets are For Dreamers' because the work has been launched previously, and I haven’t discussed ‘Chrome, Bone, and Microphone’ - not because of the Volvo poem - but because, as performance poetry, it’s better performed than deliberated here.

I’ll finish with another blurb on the back of Tim’s book, from Heather Cam. She writes, Thorne is ‘A wry and perceptive observer of human folly, greed and self-deception. [He] assumes the role of smiling surgeon’. Just so. Tim operates on himself, exposing human frailty and hypocrisy, performing ‘genre manipulation’, by suturing moments in history to po-faced playfulness. I hope Tim forgives me for comparing him to an ‘old dog’ and to Kaguya the mouse, for Tim’s not so much a mouse that roars as one that leads us to the guillotine and asks us sweety to say ‘cheese’.

Thank You, Tim Thorne for 131 pages of thought-provoking reading, a rare book - one that is intellectual rather than self-interested. Head and Shin is launched. And I’ll hand you over to Tim.