POETRY REVIEW CONTEST - ENTRIES

Here are the entries.

The links to the poems are here.

Enjoy!

ENTRY #1

"Man's Inhumanity To Man" - review of Martyr's Beach

The message of this poem is an old one.
It has been with us for a long time.
The seaweed is red with blood on many shores.

The dunes of time regenerate
and our histories are forgiving and forgetting.
The sand we stand on is fragile
and red with blood.

Many humans live their lives
a day at a time.
They hunt and fish,
plant and harvest
and dream.

They seek a better life for themselves
and their children,
They love life.

Sadly the fate of so many
are buried in an old museum
on the back page of a "yellowing scrapbook".

For trespassing on "prime grazing land",
these aboriginals were slaughtered
and all that remains is a hand written label announcing,
"little is known of the way of life
of the original inhabitants of this area".

I think the author has presented his case
very well with this poem
that speaks so eloquently and forcefully of "man's inhumanity to man", especially
in the last two lines.

His choice of words, for the most part,
are those found in common speech.

I do like the metaphor of,
"regenerating dunes" which I took to mean, our human attempts to cleanse history.

I like, "little is known of the way of life...'
for surely little will be known unless we are willing to get to know and understand different cultures.

This is a sad epitaph for a proud people with so much to offer, if only we had been willing to listen and learn.

ENTRY #2

Knowledge Lost at Sea

Ishmael, Martyrs’ beach, and After arrival – storm at sea share similar settings: beaches or ocean baths. But more than that, each juxtaposes the present against the past, and carries an implication that modern civilization has lost valuable knowledge.

In Ishmael, for example, modern swimmers regard the remains of a whale with disgust. To them, the carcass is so much rubbish, the disposal of which will require cumbersome machinery. However, at one time, the poet observes, such a carcass would have been a boon. Every shred would have been used for food, shelter, and tools. (I imagine the modern swimmers wandering off, grumbling, to a nearby concession stand to consume overpriced processed snacks with little plastic forks, as they wait for the whale to be dismembered and carted away.)

In Martyrs’ Beach, the modern museum dismisses the aboriginal civilization with a terse sign next to a few broken remnants, admitting it knows next to nothing about those who lived there for millennia. The sign makes no mention of the tragic seaside massacre of the aboriginals – that knowledge is reduced to a brief reference buried in the back of a yellowing scrapbook.

In After arrival – storm at sea, most people theorize that the sudden death of vast numbers of mutton birds is due to an array of modern ills ranging from pollution to oil spills. But a very old woman knows that the true cause is much simpler and has nothing to do with man – a storm at sea.

ENTRY #3


It’s tempting to take on all nine poems from this selection by Sydney-based poet Mark Roberts. After all, he’s offered them up as a package, so it’s fairly certain they weren’t chosen at random. In fact, it’s safe to assume the poet views them representative of his style and voice. And, taken as a collection, they do present a compelling spectrum of skill and intensity, moving from precise, almost clinical description to elegant concepts fueled by viscerally-charged imagery.

Yet tucked in the middle of the list are three poems that immediately drew me in. While varied in narrative context and tone, they struck me with their deceptively understated insights into the human condition, all set against the formidable backdrop of the ocean.

These “ocean poems” feature the same sparse punctuation and varied stanzas as the others, but they breathe more and unfold more gently. One could be forgiven, in light of their common setting, for receiving them as one would receive the tide—rolling in, then receding, all the while mysteriously advancing.

In Martyrs’ beach, After arrival – storm at sea and ishamel, the poet pulls back from the individual alienation and detached, sometimes cynical, observations that mark the other works, into a broader and more serene study of the family of humankind and its common struggles.


Martyrs’ beach opens with startling images of a red tide, which the poet imagines as the detritus of violence. We discover why in the middle stanza:

at the local museum
we find buried at the back
of a yellowing scrapbook
a reference to a seaside massacre
of aboriginals who had
‘trespassed on prime grazing land’

All that remains of the “seaside massacre” is a collection of spear fragments in a wooden showcase. But it is on the accompanying “hand written label” that the ugly and perpetual history of human aggression, ignorance and unwitting irony is writ large:

“little is known of the way of life
of the original inhabitants of the area”

Indeed.


Like Martyrs’ beach (and, as we’ll see later, ishamel), After arrival – storm at sea is told in first person plural. The shared experience of we lends the poem a gravity that might otherwise be lacking in the subjective narrative of the individual, and it illustrates the power of group perception.

In this case, the group:

… burst onto the beach to be confronted
by the stench of dead mutton birds.
they stretch in a decaying black line
along the high water mark.
others lie rotting, caught on the rocks
at each end of the beach.

It only gets worse over the headland, in the next beach, where they:

…find carnage even greater
a wall of feathers bones and maggots
piled high.

A traumatizing scene, to be sure, in both scale and senselessness. The remainder of the poem wrestles with the latter, and our group finds two schools of opinion on the subject:

in the general store
the talk is of pollution –
oil spills up the coast
or poison feed.

but

…in the bottle shop
an old woman
tells us of a storm at sea,
of birds dropping
exhausted into the waves.

The metaphorical distinction between the chatter of townsfolk and the tale of the old woman is certainly up for interpretation: forward-looking environmental concern versus the backward-looking fable informed by folk history and superstition; self-determination versus fatalism; profit versus prophet. But any reasonable analysis is sure to be laced with the contradictions of human nature.

The poet shows no favoritism between the competing theories, and our group reaches no conclusions. But this absence of resolution is significant in and of itself, offering a glimpse into our native uncertainty when it comes to our place in nature.


Ishmael, by contrast, most assuredly has a resolution. A whale has been inexplicably beached in an ocean-side pool:

floating like a cut puppet
fins & tail tugged
by waves breaking
over weathered concrete walls

Immediately, we are transported into the banality of the modern mind, specifically:

… the discussion
of how to remove tons
of dead whale
without destroying the pool

The poet withdraws from these pedestrian concerns and, in what might be mistaken for a flash of nostalgia, reflects on the fact that:

before swimming pools
such a stranding
would trigger a celebration
that would last for weeks
food for everyone
huge fires on the beach
spears treated with whale blubber
bones broken up for tools and shelter.

But this is more than wistful daydream. The stanza sings with the hallmarks of cultural survival: food, tools and ritual.

In the closing stanza, we are back in our own time, where

we wait for cranes
trucks
& chain saws
whale cut to truck size pieces
& dumped in landfill.

The only ritual that remains is to use the tools to waste the food. It is this very scene of routine industry that stands as a damning indictment of modern myopia.

Whether catalyst, metaphor or merely setting, the ocean—wellspring of life and ancient, heaving mystery—has always been generous to poets. Roberts, and his readers, are well-served by these modest little gifts from its endless horizons.

ENTRY #4

Three poems / three criteria

In a poem I look for language, meaning, and feeling.

Language that includes internal rhyme is my favorite. To my ear pencil, spent and intention form a sound cluster; to hear such rhymes, I must slow down my reading and give the poem space to grow.

Meaning depends on the poet’s skill and the reader’s experience. I once wrote a poem that described exactly my yearning to visit a European castle; my professor said it was “an aesthetic ink blot.” A definite lack of skill...

As to feeling, I want a poem to open like a Japanese fan, each rib revealing more until the scene is complete and my heart grasps the ineffable. This, of course, is totally subjective.

Now for these three poems…

The strength of Martyrs’ beach’s is in its meaning. Knowledge of aboriginal history isn’t required to understand the slaughter or the irony: because they were killed, little was known of them. A touching insight diminished by the pedestrian language, perhaps chosen to underline casual slaughter and to match the quotes. The single flourish is the blood red seaweed foretelling the massacre.

Posthumous is an extended metaphor – a poet’s life, starting with his hopes and moving ever deeper into failure. The quickening movement -- driving, hit by a speeding car, then flying -- feels like time speeding up towards the end of life. The final line, “the sudden pleasure of beak on eyeball,” nails an image he has been lacking. The quotidian language – traffic, engine failure, the left turn at an exit – plays nicely against the metaphors – the circling shadows (critics, buzzards) or the small fertile section in the field of poems. When I reach the end, the fan is open and I understand his struggle. What is more, I care about it.

Camera Man was my favorite. Each stanza had a falling sensation in its rhythm and the poem was lit by humor. Again, to my ear, the language was pedestrian, except for “the stone was placed here in the dreaming”, but it led me quickly forward to the sky of the ending. The two similar lines -- “danced for an instant” and “laugh for a moment” -- were disappointing in such a short poem. That said, the meaning was clear and the ending unexpected. This is a poem I would share with friends.

ENTRY #5

Comments on three poems

1. Ishmael

It has a truly genuine feel for past and present, and evokes emotion and understanding of changes of needs and priorities.


2. Building Site...


I love the sensory detail of the smell of "freshly sawn wood" even though there was a spelling error on dispatches. But I type on a wii, and can't shake my finger on that count.


3. Last Day of War


It has an eerie and out of body feel to it which is fitting.

ENTRY #6

Comments on "posthumous" by Mark Roberts

Right away, time is blurred and as I read I am drawn into a point of view that is progressively unanchored from bodily reality. At first it isn't clear whether the point of view is that of the dead poet or not, but it quickly becomes obvious that yes, it is, only the point of view is blasted open by the shock of death and shift of reality that is imagined to be taking place.

Not so much a life review, as is said to happen in afterlife, but more a work review seems to preoccupy. "death of the writer. death of the poet." But is it truly physical death being imagined? The sports car driving too fast, that cuts him in half, is driving "in the fog of this poem." At this point, the question opens even wider: what has happened, really? Death? or something even more fragmenting? And, is there such an event?

The metaphor of death continues as the poet dies again in a plane crash and his point of view is again confused and time is folded on itself: "so he will try & walk out using a broken compass and a shattered memory."

He is alive enough he still hopes for a poem over the horizon.

And then again the point of view shifts to the poet writing about the poet, asking how to describe the process of death, the physical death and the death of the poem.

The final two lines are abrupt and painful, almost too much, unless the struggle to write is understood to require that shock and grounding into present intensity "of beak on eyeball."

So in the end, I understand this to be, not a fantasy about how it is to die, but a wrenched cry out of the struggle to create something worthy, as real as a punctured eyeball.

ENTRY #7

Thoughts on “The last day of war.”


Once an interpretation is in mind, however true to the poet’s intent, that interpretation is like a magnet sucking the rest of the words and phrases to glom on. Some of them fit nice and flush while others are attached in rather awkward fashion. A great poem seldom makes perfect sense throughout, yet it need not for the reader to find meaning within its lines. Such is the case with my interpretation of "The last day of war." by Mark Roberts.


To one reader this poem is likened to a photograph. It captures the waning of war and the waxing of normalcy, seen in a most unique moment when both are but half true. It draws us quietly and subtly to that edge to experience this oddity that includes both and yet is neither—like the breaking light before sunrise is neither night nor day. Even the circling motion of the cockatoos could be understood as meant to demonstrate the ‘between’ nature of the moments. Yes they are circling, flying freely and with seeming ease as on any other normal day, but they are also scavenging due to the very recent ravages of war.


But unlike a photograph, there is also the masterful marriage of sights and sounds which give the poem its palpable quality, and all designed to fulfill this most curious, intraday blend of war and peace… right down to the intermittent gunfire.

ENTRY #8

The Last Day of War

This poem captures a vivid scene of modern warfare, as it happens in a flash-one-day, or as slowly remembered from yesterday. The block chunk of stanza is like a journal entry, detached, disconnected from the ongoing tragedy yet blithely scribed and illustrated with metaphorical cockatoos. In just a few lines, a sense of eyewitness-viewpoint draws the reader on, to an ultimately illusive conclusion, much like the actual resolution of that historic conflict.

The poem’s closing lines might express the opinion of day-trippers, individuals or soldiers in its cautious report: “So far neither bells nor flags” as it passes by, but the ambiguity of the conclusion, with this nearly audacious observation (in basic typewriter font, as if rendered on a Royal ™ in the field): “Wailing of sirens & intermittent gunfire” extends the poem beyond the now, the then, and evokes the metaphorical time-frame of war – as if the reader is barely vouchsafed passage across the western front one hundred years ago (felt the same way on the 2nd read). The repetition of “sirens” strikes this reader as more than intentional and quickens the pace and lengthens the distance from the scene described – the implied distance between those on a train heading for lunch and those behind factory walls (bomb sites) “toppling heavily” but dispassionately (and safely) behind (or beyond) the view of the poem, as if the “last day” will last forever. This reader felt the need to reread and re-enjoy the poem again. And again.