Peter Boyle
In an event to coincide with the U.S. vote on the 4th of November (Sydney, Australia time), Quemar placed online the conclusion of the analytical just-completed U.S. Election Night poem by Jennifer Maiden, George Jeffreys Woke Up in Mt Druitt Skyping with President Trump on Election Night 2020, making the whole poem available now. Here Trump is imagined face-to-face with human rights inspectors amidst the unusual election night. The breathtakingly up-to-the-minute poem can be read on our News page:
https://quemarpress.weebly.com/news.html __________________________________________ |
We thank our readers for their warm responses to this. The esteemed poet and translator Peter Boyle wrote:
'Love the way Jennifer keeps responding to our political-social world on a day by day basis, making poetry, thought and political engagement all flow into each other in such original ways' The poem will be in her forthcoming collection Biological Necessity (Quemar, 2021). ___________________________________________ |
Anne Collins
The practised and adept Tasmanian poet Anne Collins commented about Uses of Biological Necessity', Quemar's first preview poem for Jennifer Maiden's collection in-progress, Biological Necessity: 'I really enjoyed the sensibility expressed in Jennifer Maiden's new preview poem as well as the story it tells....' and on Maiden's work in general: 'the political understory of [Maiden's] poetry... is... alarmingly contemporary.' ___________________________________________ |
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Jonathan Shaw
The online critic Jonathan Shaw published an insightful review of Quemar's paperback Play With Knives: Five: George and Clare, the Malachite and the Diamonds by Jennifer Maiden.
From the review: 'all the ingredients of a thriller [but the]... precision and visual qualities are anything but prosaic... There's quite a bit of sexual tension and actual sex, lots of violence, and a satisfying twist at the end... Thrillers are often impregnated with right-wing ideology. Not the George and Clare books... extraordinary insight into international politics... a fun read.' The entire review can be read at: https://shawjonathan.com/2020/10/17/jennifer-maiden-george-and-clare-the-malachite-and-the-diamonds/ ___________________________________________________________________ |
Gig Ryan
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Tim Thorne
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We thank our readers for their warm comments on our latest paperback, Jennifer Maiden's The Cuckold and the Vampires (an essay on some aspects of conservative political manipulation of art and literature). Gig Ryan has commended 'a lot of interesting history regarding the 1970s and 1980s in Australian poetry, as well as autobiographical details, that should be of interest to younger readers', and Tim Thorne has called it a '...very insightful essay. I am glad [Maiden wasn't] afraid to include [her] own work among the references that buttress [her] arguments. Too many essayists err on the side of being coldly impersonal. It is wonderful to have so many aspects of our culture and so many of those individuals who have contributed to it put in a meaningful political context. Well done! For example, I had never thought of the "Poetry Wars" as anything more than a mild joke... but of course, as [she points] out, the concept was used to stifle or ignore real poetic/political and potentially creative conflict... This work stands as not only a slightly removed commentary on and adjunct to [Maiden's] recent poetry but, much more than that, a tour de force in its own right. Congratulations.'
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Nikoleta Zampaki
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In the online journal Plumwood Mountain, University of Athens scholar, Nikoleta Zampaki wrote a discerning review of Margaret Bennett and Jennifer Maiden's Workbook Questions: Writing of Torture, Trauma Experience.
From the review:
'The aim of this workbook is to facilitate and help survivors of traumatic experiences and torture though writing them, under the guidance of planned questions as methodological tools (clinical perspective). The overall goal is to create a domain where communities that have experienced trauma can find their identity and self and interconnect with each other.
First of all, the discussion between Bennett and Maiden raises a variety of potential questions around trauma as embodied experience (trauma’s outskirts) – the emotions or the senses that were the result of traumatic experience. Maiden addresses the important role of emotions, sensations and events on trauma’s outskirts by asking about the survivors’ situation in a place, their feelings and how they can be helped to thrive.
The start of writing this useful workbook was dated back to South American women torture survivors, two decades ago...
This workbook aimed to free these women from their inner worries, anxieties and fears, and gave them back their voices that had been kept captive for many years. In addition, the workbook ameliorated their expression, stylistic way of writing and their way to express their views and opinions openly. So, their writing skills and critical spirit were enforced and this oriented them in another liberating way apart from just writing their traumatic experiences as static moments or timelines of their lives...
The questions of the workbook are appealing today as each one of us can answer them as a vivid, representative of the way experience itself questions. Traumatic experiences can decode our inner world and create a field of questioning other experiences or memories of the past.
The workbook’s discussion is written in a spiritual and vivid manner, full of details and experiences. Thus, each reader can read the book at once to find the inner character of traumatic experience as embodied. The authors proposed a therapeutic way to recover all these traumas of the South American women and they analysed carefully and in details their behaviour in a traumatic situation and after it...
The questionnaire of this workbook is descriptive and searches in details the inner world of each one that will fill it. The main core is to explore more in the trauma’s world and deepen our knowledge around the topic...
This workbook has a distinct character of forming and exercising creativity via different encounters with frames which might either represent the writer’s or learner’s subjectivity or not. We dive into the unknowing parts of our writer self and writing patterns...
. This workbook is an empirical novel addition in the current research in relation to creative writing on trauma. The authors would like to heal or recover participants’ souls through the writing, expression and critical view. As the participants searched and analysed their traumas, they understood their experiences and became more familiar with them, enabling them to face them radically. The radical character of authors’ research is obvious by their organisation and decision to help the participants face to face with their own traumas or tortures.
In conclusion, the purpose of this book is a double manifestation: to free from inner traumas in general and to form an individual narration about them in practice. The workbook offers new data over the disciplines of traumatic experiences and their practical recovery.'
The full review is available at:
https://plumwoodmountain.com/nikoleta-zampaki-reviews-workbook-questions-writing-of-torture-trauma-experience-by-margaret-bennett-and-jennifer-maiden/
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From the review:
'The aim of this workbook is to facilitate and help survivors of traumatic experiences and torture though writing them, under the guidance of planned questions as methodological tools (clinical perspective). The overall goal is to create a domain where communities that have experienced trauma can find their identity and self and interconnect with each other.
First of all, the discussion between Bennett and Maiden raises a variety of potential questions around trauma as embodied experience (trauma’s outskirts) – the emotions or the senses that were the result of traumatic experience. Maiden addresses the important role of emotions, sensations and events on trauma’s outskirts by asking about the survivors’ situation in a place, their feelings and how they can be helped to thrive.
The start of writing this useful workbook was dated back to South American women torture survivors, two decades ago...
This workbook aimed to free these women from their inner worries, anxieties and fears, and gave them back their voices that had been kept captive for many years. In addition, the workbook ameliorated their expression, stylistic way of writing and their way to express their views and opinions openly. So, their writing skills and critical spirit were enforced and this oriented them in another liberating way apart from just writing their traumatic experiences as static moments or timelines of their lives...
The questions of the workbook are appealing today as each one of us can answer them as a vivid, representative of the way experience itself questions. Traumatic experiences can decode our inner world and create a field of questioning other experiences or memories of the past.
The workbook’s discussion is written in a spiritual and vivid manner, full of details and experiences. Thus, each reader can read the book at once to find the inner character of traumatic experience as embodied. The authors proposed a therapeutic way to recover all these traumas of the South American women and they analysed carefully and in details their behaviour in a traumatic situation and after it...
The questionnaire of this workbook is descriptive and searches in details the inner world of each one that will fill it. The main core is to explore more in the trauma’s world and deepen our knowledge around the topic...
This workbook has a distinct character of forming and exercising creativity via different encounters with frames which might either represent the writer’s or learner’s subjectivity or not. We dive into the unknowing parts of our writer self and writing patterns...
. This workbook is an empirical novel addition in the current research in relation to creative writing on trauma. The authors would like to heal or recover participants’ souls through the writing, expression and critical view. As the participants searched and analysed their traumas, they understood their experiences and became more familiar with them, enabling them to face them radically. The radical character of authors’ research is obvious by their organisation and decision to help the participants face to face with their own traumas or tortures.
In conclusion, the purpose of this book is a double manifestation: to free from inner traumas in general and to form an individual narration about them in practice. The workbook offers new data over the disciplines of traumatic experiences and their practical recovery.'
The full review is available at:
https://plumwoodmountain.com/nikoleta-zampaki-reviews-workbook-questions-writing-of-torture-trauma-experience-by-margaret-bennett-and-jennifer-maiden/
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Elizabeth Webby
The unique and admirable Professor Elizabeth Webby commented on The Espionage Act : 'I very much enjoyed the ones involving Gore Vidal and Assange, and of course those with the critic and various writers, especially Borges and Garcia Marquez...this [book] has entertained me at a time when there is little to laugh about.'
Jason Steger
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When The Espionage Act was still forthcoming, the painstaking and brilliant editor, journalist and critic Jason Steger featured one of its poems in his Fairfax Bookmarks column (19/4/2019):
Jennifer Maiden has always been a poet with an eye for the political. So it’s no surprise that she has tackled the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a new poem called Resistance...Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy in London was notable for a number of reasons, not least the book that he was clutching when he was stuffed into the back of a British police van. It was Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State, about what Vidal called the ‘‘Imperial Presidency’’.
The poem begins in familiar Maiden fashion: ‘‘Gore Vidal woke up in a London magistrate’s Court. Julian Assange/ was beside him ...’’ and goes on to eviscerate the magistrate ‘‘who was the one who had/ stopped a private prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes’’.
Later the narrator says of Assange: ‘‘he seemed to share the love of Montaignian honesty/ in discourse Vidal regarded as the first necessity/ to perpetuate the human’’ and goes on ‘‘Perpetuating this human/ however, would not be an easy task’’.
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Jennifer Maiden has always been a poet with an eye for the political. So it’s no surprise that she has tackled the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a new poem called Resistance...Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy in London was notable for a number of reasons, not least the book that he was clutching when he was stuffed into the back of a British police van. It was Gore Vidal’s History of the National Security State, about what Vidal called the ‘‘Imperial Presidency’’.
The poem begins in familiar Maiden fashion: ‘‘Gore Vidal woke up in a London magistrate’s Court. Julian Assange/ was beside him ...’’ and goes on to eviscerate the magistrate ‘‘who was the one who had/ stopped a private prosecution of Tony Blair for war crimes’’.
Later the narrator says of Assange: ‘‘he seemed to share the love of Montaignian honesty/ in discourse Vidal regarded as the first necessity/ to perpetuate the human’’ and goes on ‘‘Perpetuating this human/ however, would not be an easy task’’.
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Magdalena Ball
Remarkable Poet and critic Magdalena Ball wrote an accomplished and engaging review of The Espionage Act in the online Literature review, Compulsive Reader.
From the review: 'Jennifer Maiden’s work has always been politically engaged. Genre-defying, whimsical and irreverent, she’s not afraid to revive historical characters and pair them with current political, literary, artistic and fictional people in order to allow for perspectives and analyses that are far reaching and deep. Her extensive reading and astute observations are obvious in her latest book of poetry, The Espionage Act, which is full of political, artistic, and literary awakenings. The work covers so much ground, and yet is also poetic, pointed, condensed, and focused. As the title suggests, The Espionage Act explores a wide range of subjects about and around espionage, including the use of The Espionage Act which was used to imprison Assange, and about morality in general... There is much to be learned here about Deep State, the US 1917 Espionage Act, WikiLeaks and the Vault 7 cache, Gore Vidal, the way in which the CIA (as a backer for the Congress for Cultural Freedom) used American modern art as a weapon in the Cold War, the tricks of the British MI6, the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, the use of the Turing Test during the 1950s, fake news, and the Australian Poetry Wars, to name a few of the areas that this book tackles. This is a very wide reaching book that explores the abuses of power, media spin, and the way governments manipulate and impact on what the public is allowed to know, though throughout the poetry is always rich, self-sustaining, and powerful... This is work that not only provides a different kind of news, engaging with issues like free speech, democracy, aesthetics and ethics, a continual source of interest for Maiden and one she explores with the full weight of her poetic talent, but also allows the reader to see things from a different...perspective... Funny, pithy, frightening, smart, and politically astute, Maiden’s latest book The Espionage Act is both timely and timeless and is a delight to read and explore.' The entire review is available at: http://www.compulsivereader.com/2020/01/05/a-review-of-the-espionage-act-by-jennifer-maiden/ ___________________________________________________________________ |
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Jonathan Shaw
Critic Jonathan Shaw, published a thorough and enjoyable review of 'The Espionage Act: New Poems', analysing the work and its context, power, form and musicality.
From the review: 'If there’s an overall subject, it’s the way reactionary politics infiltrates and influences the general culture, belittles creativity and promotes art that serves its purposes. And what it means to struggle against that influence.' '...the effect is hypnotic, but if even without your noticing it the lines have a wonderful musicality that pushes the narrative forward.' 'I’ve been reading and rereading this book for a while now. I’ve been learning about history (I think of Muriel Rukeyser’s repeated line, "Pay Attention to what they tell you to forget"), making connections between things I’ve known and kept in silos in my mind, and questioning received versions of things, all with Jennifer Maiden’s insistent music in my ears.' The entire review can be read at: https://shawjonathan.com/2020/04/05/jennifer-maidens-espionage-act/ ___________________________________________________________________ |
Anne Collins
James Jiang's review includes: 'Maiden wrings music out of recalcitrant syllabic material and shows the intuition of a keen moral psychologist.
"Literature,’ Ezra Pound once said, ‘is news that stays news." While Maiden’s poetry has never failed to be topical, the demands of keeping up with every twist in the bowels of the deep state have been a drain on her rhetorical powers. Weariness has set in for the poet and her characters. Whether it is a ‘weariness that draws old energy from sea beaches’ remains to be seen.' In answer to this, the fine and experienced poet Anne Collins responds: |
James Jiang
Australian Book Review made The Espionage Act - Quemar's most recent collection from Jennifer Maiden - their Book of the Week.
To accompany this, Australian Book Review featured James Jiang's review of the book on their website and in their magazine's print edition. From the review: '...deals with the political, cultural, and sexual drama of espionage. "The Espionage Act" invites the reader to view an array of contemporary events... through the prism of twentieth-century intelligence history. Maiden shows herself immensely literate in the varieties of jargon employed by spies and their agencies; one of the pleasures afforded by this volume... Since Maiden’s celebrated book "Friendly Fire"(2005), her work has consistently sought to dramatise the aftershocks of geopolitical upheaval at the level of the domestic and intimate. "The Espionage Act" continues in this vein... ...recovery in a world webbed with murderous design is the unspoken hope that marks so many of the new poems. One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue. It is there in Gore Vidal’s solicitude towards a sleeping Assange in "Gore Vidal Woke Up in Belmarsh Prison": "Assange’s face had gentled younger, perhaps / due to the lack of close eyesight, to white light / from the barred window, the small television / with its simplifications like childhood.…"' The full review can be read at: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/features/abr-online-exclusives/225-abr-online-exclusives/6252-james-jiang-reviews-the-espionage-act-new-poems-by-jennifer-maiden ___________________________________________________________________ |
'When I read the review, I thought that although it praised the work, the reviewer needed a bit more life experience (if that doesn't sound too patronising) to appreciate that what he was calling "tired" (the political understory of the poetry) is in fact alarmingly contemporary.'
Katharine Margot Toohey, the founder and publisher of Quemar Press also commented on the review:
'Thanks for this in-depth effort. This line is great: ‘One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue.’
To clarify regarding weariness: weariness, weariness in corruption, weariness in politics/espionage and weariness of the artist are actually themes in the collection, not a commentary on the poems or the poet. In terms of politics, it was interesting how media sources tended to try to apply the term 'too weary to continue' to Bernie Sanders until his recent success in Nevada. It seems it's used often to mean 'a physical state in which someone is worn-down or practically handicapped' and the idea that someone cannot function in that state. But far from anything eugenic or Darwinian, survival (physical, artistic and political) depends often on reflecting on tiredness to continue. In "Diary Poem: Uses of Corruption", Maiden writes: "Talking of the weariness of actors, Richard/Burton on a set once advised his daughter Kate,/who was exhausted, that the best thing was to use/the tiredness in playing the part,/not hide it."
Just to quickly clarify a couple of things: Maiden uses the term 'honeytrap' not 'honeypot' to look at the deliberate the use of intimacy to compromise someone politically. Maiden was also not saying that Turing's preoccupation with Snow White was related to his death, but that Intelligence forces may have used that preoccupation to suggest that he had died by self-poisoned apple, while in fact there was apparently no poison in the apple.'
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Katharine Margot Toohey, the founder and publisher of Quemar Press also commented on the review:
'Thanks for this in-depth effort. This line is great: ‘One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue.’
To clarify regarding weariness: weariness, weariness in corruption, weariness in politics/espionage and weariness of the artist are actually themes in the collection, not a commentary on the poems or the poet. In terms of politics, it was interesting how media sources tended to try to apply the term 'too weary to continue' to Bernie Sanders until his recent success in Nevada. It seems it's used often to mean 'a physical state in which someone is worn-down or practically handicapped' and the idea that someone cannot function in that state. But far from anything eugenic or Darwinian, survival (physical, artistic and political) depends often on reflecting on tiredness to continue. In "Diary Poem: Uses of Corruption", Maiden writes: "Talking of the weariness of actors, Richard/Burton on a set once advised his daughter Kate,/who was exhausted, that the best thing was to use/the tiredness in playing the part,/not hide it."
Just to quickly clarify a couple of things: Maiden uses the term 'honeytrap' not 'honeypot' to look at the deliberate the use of intimacy to compromise someone politically. Maiden was also not saying that Turing's preoccupation with Snow White was related to his death, but that Intelligence forces may have used that preoccupation to suggest that he had died by self-poisoned apple, while in fact there was apparently no poison in the apple.'
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Kris Hemensley
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Jan Owen
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We are grateful for continuing warm comments about our latest paperback, All She Resolves to Rescue - a work presenting Marie de France's great medieval romances Lanval and Guildeluec and Guilliadon (known as Eliduc) in Quemar Press' new Modern English translation, with the original Anglo-Norman French, and a subjective essay on the translations.
The distinguished translator and poet Jan Owen wrote: 'Well you have rescued those Lais for the modern English reader. It is a lovely book, both text and illustrations, and the essay is a fine inclusion. You have certainly kept the tone and delicacy of feeling of the originals; also the swiftness and surprise. I’ve just reread Lanval with pleasure and dipped into Guildeluec and Guilliadon. It’s enjoyable puzzling out the Breton too... I’ll reward myself tonight by reading slowly, in sequence, time travelling to those medieval courts with your help. Congratulations!'
Quemar is also proud that this paperback inspired a new poem by the erudite, perceptive and much gifted poet Kris Hemensley. He wrote, too, that he admired Quemar's 'commitment to... writing, translating, publishing', and he commented about All She Resolves to Rescue: 'Touched and tickled and impressed!' 'First fast flick took me to that dear little town Totnes, enroute as it is for your travellers Exeter! And I popped that into one of my ramble scribblings.'
His poem begins with a quote from the book:
' "I will tell you this story. / I will tell you
honestly."....:
(.........) dear
bell of the heart ring like
Westgarth Church's did twenty years
ago (poemd already) [Beat's
essay continuing --present
in the moment collecting
ancient Chinese & Japanese in
very same crescent --
is what i'm ever about
& always meant'
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Gig Ryan
One of the best books of 2019 in the 'Sydney Morning Herald/The Age' was our collection by Jennifer Maiden 'The Espionage Act' (we were proud, though the book was not yet officially released then!). Renowned poet and critic Gig Ryan wrote: 'Jennifer Maiden’s 'The Espionage Act' (Quemar Press) continues her sharply staged commentaries on machinations of power: "it is such great violence nothing comprehends it."' https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/the-books-we-loved-in-2019-20191204-p53gvg.html ___________________________________________________________________ |
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Siobhan Hodge
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The poet and scholar, Siobhan Hodge wrote a discerning review of Jennifer Maiden's Selected Poems 1967-2018 and brookings: the noun in the esteemed online journal, Plumwood Mountain.
From the review:
'Maiden’s astute political and historical knowledge threads a balance between dry humour and sinister revelation...
Maiden’s brookings: the noun is an investigation of the myriad failures of platitudes and their grim undertones...
The speaker takes firmer ownership of voices. Maiden’s crispness of imagery, paired with sharp and complex observations of human nature on political stages across history are consistent forces...
The morally questionable judgments of historical figures are infinitely accessible and Maiden’s speaker resolutely shifts back, letting the sombre tones of such pieces be implicit in poetic setting and selection of detail, rather than clear and direct speech. Fundamentally, these are the works of a historical poetic scholar...
In both texts, I have been consistently surprised (occasionally amused) and always intrigued by Maiden’s selections of figures, their unlikely pairs and parallels, and their implications for the wider world...
Maiden’s poetics also stand perfectly on their own. They are compellingly presented with standout imagery, but there is always more to unpack.'
The full review can be read at:
https://plumwoodmountain.com/siobhan-hodge-reviews-brookings-the-noun-and-selected-poems-1967-2018-by-jennifer-maiden/
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The fine poet, critic and novelist, Gregory Day had a valuable review of brookings: the noun in The Australian newspaper on the 22/23 of June, 2019. From the review: 'Throughout her long, brilliant, and what one could fairly presume to be her absurdly underpaid writing life, Maiden has consistently tied the common pleasures of narrative and characterisation to the more obliquely descriptive imagery associated with contemporary poetry. She is as much a storyteller as she is an image-maker or a constructor of linguistic polyphony or the assonant line. Indeed, her own collections are very much like individual sections, or fascicles, of a broader life-bound book. It is a book the Sydney poet has been stitching together for decades, in which each single section is built from ongoing threads that spill and splay in various directions, refusing to terminate within the slim constraints of front and back covers... The word is 'brookings', introduced to us explicitly in the title as 'the noun', and in the publisher's introduction as a term redeployed by the poet to unmask the tendency of destructive political agendas to smuggle themselves into the mainstream as 'safe-seeming', or even homely solutions. The book sits etymologically as a seam between the peace of the bubbling brook and the power of the river, as well as in the morphological zone whereby a word with marshy, riparian roots can be technocratically repurposed as the name of an American research group that aims 'to foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and co-operative international system'... In this kind of ingenious way, sheaf by sheaf, Maiden has created her own rules for what constitutes a book of poems, committing herself as she goes by providing wry shamanic commentary on a world besotted by its own self-referring hysteria.' |
Gregory Day
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In the digital review Compulsive Reader, Magdalena Ball wrote a far-reaching and illuminating review of Jennifer Maiden's new collection 'brookings: the noun'. From the review:
'Jennifer Maiden’s writing is always strikingly current, and takes a laser-sharp view of politics, trends, scientific discoveries, and the state of the world, viewed through a political and poetic lens. Maiden’s latest poetry collection, brookings: the noun, is no exception. The poetry pivots around the word “brookings” and its various meanings, explored through the poems in a way that is often meta-analytical and meta-poetic. The Brookings Institute in the US is a government-funded organisation for research, analysis, and outreach around defence and the future of war, and that is certainly one of the many references. ‘Brookings’ is also a little brook, seemingly safe but with the potential to turn at any time into a larger river. It can be a front to something more dangerous, signifying in this instance, a feint or a way of concealing something dangerous in order to fool the public: “brookings sleek as pebbles in our mouth for elocution”. In Maiden’s world, brookings include bandwagons around “noble causes” which also make it easy for people to replace action with hashtags in order to tick the box of engagement without actually engaging...
Anyone who thinks of poetry as politically benign will be surprised by the intensity and engagement in this work...
The slide between personal, political, and literary is super smooth and almost imperceptible at times—so the reader is drawn into the situation as participant, gaining appreciation for the complexity of the (real life) situations the characters find themselves in...
As with all of Maiden’s books, brookings: the noun is powerfully astute and thought-provoking, pulling together disparate ideas, deep emotion, and critical thinking and empathy in places where they’re often not found... A rich lyrical ear. This is work that is as evocative as it is incisive.'
The complete review can be read at:
http://www.compulsivereader.com/2019/05/17/a-review-of-brookings-the-noun-by-jennifer-maiden/
'Jennifer Maiden’s writing is always strikingly current, and takes a laser-sharp view of politics, trends, scientific discoveries, and the state of the world, viewed through a political and poetic lens. Maiden’s latest poetry collection, brookings: the noun, is no exception. The poetry pivots around the word “brookings” and its various meanings, explored through the poems in a way that is often meta-analytical and meta-poetic. The Brookings Institute in the US is a government-funded organisation for research, analysis, and outreach around defence and the future of war, and that is certainly one of the many references. ‘Brookings’ is also a little brook, seemingly safe but with the potential to turn at any time into a larger river. It can be a front to something more dangerous, signifying in this instance, a feint or a way of concealing something dangerous in order to fool the public: “brookings sleek as pebbles in our mouth for elocution”. In Maiden’s world, brookings include bandwagons around “noble causes” which also make it easy for people to replace action with hashtags in order to tick the box of engagement without actually engaging...
Anyone who thinks of poetry as politically benign will be surprised by the intensity and engagement in this work...
The slide between personal, political, and literary is super smooth and almost imperceptible at times—so the reader is drawn into the situation as participant, gaining appreciation for the complexity of the (real life) situations the characters find themselves in...
As with all of Maiden’s books, brookings: the noun is powerfully astute and thought-provoking, pulling together disparate ideas, deep emotion, and critical thinking and empathy in places where they’re often not found... A rich lyrical ear. This is work that is as evocative as it is incisive.'
The complete review can be read at:
http://www.compulsivereader.com/2019/05/17/a-review-of-brookings-the-noun-by-jennifer-maiden/
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Magdalena Ball has just published a shrewd and exciting review of the final title in Jennifer Maiden's experimental Play With Knives quintet of novels in poetry and prose - Play with Knives: Five: George and Clare, the Malachite and the Diamonds.
From the review: 'As you’d expect from a master wordsmith/poet like Maiden, the writing... is evocative and powerful, with striking metaphors that seem to move effortlessly between philosophy, physical description, and emotional transition: "She gazed in his eyes too long: a length of time an animal would have categorised as aggression, but her uncertainties fluxed in her fixed expression, its wryness seductive with mutuality, its mutability like a kaleidoscope made from new night air"... There is also an inherent indeterminacy or multiplicity in the way the story unfolds, so that it is both a domestic story, with sumptuously described meals, personal care/tenderness... as well as being a story... involving great acts of big evil: arms dealing, drug dealing, government complicity, murder, and looming war. Maiden’s exploration is topical and sometimes chillingly prescient, as has been played out over the past twenty-nine or so years since George and Clare first made an appearance in the original Play with Knives novel...The questions and complexity remains intact, and the story open for the reader to make and remake... beautiful, rich, disturbing at times' The full review can be read at Compulsive Reader:http://www.compulsivereader.com/2019/04/15/a-review-of-play-with-knives-five-by-jennifer-maiden/ |
Magdalena Ball
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Joanne Burns wrote about brookings: the noun, Jennifer Maiden's new collection:
'brookings:the noun... is very compelling and rich - and bristling with awareness, complexity and scenario - alert to the political zeitgeist! sometimes it seems [Maiden is] the poet director of political theatre, with the paranormal ability of teleportation - as deceased historical figures suddenly appear fresh and alert on [her] stage! I have enjoyed all the strands of focus in the collection (e.g the inclusion of the diary poems) - rather in the Kali/Hindu tradition of multiple arms...and the various nuances and connotations of the 'brookings' concept are illuminating.' |
Maria Takolander
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Andrea Goldsmith
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Margaret Bennett
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Geoff Page
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From Professor Maria Takolander's review of Jennifer Maiden's 'brookings: the noun', in The Saturday Paper:
Maiden’s work is idiosyncratic, urgent and brutally intelligent. She is also committed to her imbrication in the politics of the world, dedicated to her art, and bent on making her own way forward. In fact, when her former publisher stopped producing her work, her daughter set up an independent feminist press to do the job... Maiden’s dramatic poems... Tanya Plibersek having tea with Jane Austen, Mother Teresa in dialogue with Princess Diana, Jorge Luis Borges mourning his missed Nobel prize with an Australian critic – resemble the satires of Aristophanes. But the poems do not foreclose on meaning in the way of satire. They are not about dogma. They are too playful for that, as the brilliantly handled monorhyme scheme – and comic neologisms – of the Eleanor and Hillary poem suggests. These poems are entertainment and provocation... Speaking of the literature Nobel, I can’t think of a better Australian contender.'
Full Review:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2019/02/28/brookings-the-noun/15508404007488
____________________________________
Andrea Goldsmith wrote:
'Brookings arrived yesterday... congratulations, what a compelling and challenging collection it is. And disturbing too e.g. George Jeffreys:24. I was delighted to see Jane and Tanya together again and making a better fist of the world’s problems than some of the other people in the collection, such as Trump and his family. I do enjoy the way [Maiden] bring[s] the dead back, the WISE dead back to pronounce on today’s UNwisdoms (… [does she] really dream them alive as the Coleridge poem suggests?). And of course there were laughs too e.g. "one is always a child in Geneva". I love the cover - aesthetically and intellectually powerful.
May the book travel far and wide.'
_____________________________________
On the 1st March, 2019, the online Fairfax papers ran an appreciative review by Geoff Page of Jennifer Maiden's new collection 'brookings: the noun'. The review praised the collection's poems calling them 'disturbingly effective' and saying the work '[updates her] increasingly numerous readers on the moral complexity of our slippery world.'
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/brookings-the-noun-review-jennifer-maidens-poems-across-the-political-world-20190218-h1bety.html
The review concluded with an interesting topical question about the controversial Non-Government Organisation, The White Helmets, and whether it is advisable that poems detail and analyse scenarios in which such organisations may appear malign.
Regarding the White Helmets reference in Geoff Page's review, Margaret Bennett, the former Director of NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors wrote commending brookings: the noun in a newspaper letter ('…Maiden has a penchant for exploring the ways torture and human rights abuse occur under the veneer of respectability. Brookings the Noun reminds us to be vigilant.'). The full letter, including its commentary on the dangerous aspects of NGOs, can be read on our News Page.
Maiden’s work is idiosyncratic, urgent and brutally intelligent. She is also committed to her imbrication in the politics of the world, dedicated to her art, and bent on making her own way forward. In fact, when her former publisher stopped producing her work, her daughter set up an independent feminist press to do the job... Maiden’s dramatic poems... Tanya Plibersek having tea with Jane Austen, Mother Teresa in dialogue with Princess Diana, Jorge Luis Borges mourning his missed Nobel prize with an Australian critic – resemble the satires of Aristophanes. But the poems do not foreclose on meaning in the way of satire. They are not about dogma. They are too playful for that, as the brilliantly handled monorhyme scheme – and comic neologisms – of the Eleanor and Hillary poem suggests. These poems are entertainment and provocation... Speaking of the literature Nobel, I can’t think of a better Australian contender.'
Full Review:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2019/02/28/brookings-the-noun/15508404007488
____________________________________
Andrea Goldsmith wrote:
'Brookings arrived yesterday... congratulations, what a compelling and challenging collection it is. And disturbing too e.g. George Jeffreys:24. I was delighted to see Jane and Tanya together again and making a better fist of the world’s problems than some of the other people in the collection, such as Trump and his family. I do enjoy the way [Maiden] bring[s] the dead back, the WISE dead back to pronounce on today’s UNwisdoms (… [does she] really dream them alive as the Coleridge poem suggests?). And of course there were laughs too e.g. "one is always a child in Geneva". I love the cover - aesthetically and intellectually powerful.
May the book travel far and wide.'
_____________________________________
On the 1st March, 2019, the online Fairfax papers ran an appreciative review by Geoff Page of Jennifer Maiden's new collection 'brookings: the noun'. The review praised the collection's poems calling them 'disturbingly effective' and saying the work '[updates her] increasingly numerous readers on the moral complexity of our slippery world.'
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/brookings-the-noun-review-jennifer-maidens-poems-across-the-political-world-20190218-h1bety.html
The review concluded with an interesting topical question about the controversial Non-Government Organisation, The White Helmets, and whether it is advisable that poems detail and analyse scenarios in which such organisations may appear malign.
Regarding the White Helmets reference in Geoff Page's review, Margaret Bennett, the former Director of NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors wrote commending brookings: the noun in a newspaper letter ('…Maiden has a penchant for exploring the ways torture and human rights abuse occur under the veneer of respectability. Brookings the Noun reminds us to be vigilant.'). The full letter, including its commentary on the dangerous aspects of NGOs, can be read on our News Page.
Tim Thorne
The renowned poet Tim Thorne wrote on Jennifer Maiden's new collection, brookings: the noun:
'Yet another triumph! I'm not sure I've read anything as chilling as "Mockingbird, mockingbird" And the Slessor pieces! And all that unravelling of Weltpolitik/Intel rumour!'
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tara Walker
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The blog of Antipodes, the American journal of Australian and NZ Literature, featured an intricate and in-depth review of Quemar's first paperback - Jennifer Maiden's Appalachian Fall: Poems about Poverty in Power - by the impressive poet and scholar, Tara Walker.
From the review: '...humanizing the untouchable...' 'reimagines politics from an international perspective... [of] the absurdity and chaos of globalization.' The review can be read at: https://www.antipodesjournal.org/blog/review-of-appalachian-fall-poems-about-poverty-in-power ___________________________________________ |
Dr. Lisa Gorton
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Shakti or Durga
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JEWEL, IMAGE
By Dr. Lisa Gorton on Jennifer Maiden's Selected Poems 1967-2018, Quemar Press, 2018
In ‘The Case of the Pharaoh’s...’, published in her collection Mines, Jennifer Maiden remembers hearing the story of an Indian ancestor--
Perhaps
embellished a little, my ancestor,
a Hindu princess, eloped with a British
civil servant and both were undone,
disinherited by their kin. Well done,
I thought, & drank to them. The Maidens
always drank red--
One of the pleasures of Jennifer Maiden’s poetry is how it tracks, moment-to-moment, the movement of thought; and it is characteristic of her thought to move from an image to an unfolding story, and from a story back to an image. In ‘Foxfall 3’ she writes that the speeches of Charles James Fox ‘built sequence and repetition like / a confident, cunning, passionate palace’—itself an image of how, in her thinking, process itself can form a monument.
Jewels, with their facets which at once gather and multiply light, become in her work an image of images. In her poem ‘The Problem of Evil’, published in her first collection Tactics: The Problem of Evil, she describes a barge below the sea-wall--
It is so crystallized by sun
that it bobs as a vat of reflections,
& flashes on the fissured
limit of its line--
From the first, in this light Jennifer Maiden sees a movement between crystalline form and outspreading flashes—and sees this movement, at once inwards and outwards, as an image of language itself, afloat on ‘the fissured limit of its line’. Jewels become in her work an image of images because they reveal in themselves this movement of concentrating and diversifying light—a movement that she plays out in her poetry as a movement from image into story, and into argument, and back to the image, freely.
The story of her Indian princess ancestor becomes an origin story for the jewels in her poetry. Disinheritance, generation—the story carries within itself that movement from ‘undone’ to ‘done’ in the poem’s two lines. So, in a poem set in the mountain ‘Jagungal’, the poem moves in and out of its jewel image--
Jagungal in now gone in mist. I fish
in my mind for exact colours. We walk
through filaments of moonstone now,
the sun becomes a moonstone at back
of Katharine and David. Long ago,
my ancestress from India wore
moonstones perhaps for sacredness.
There were a god and goddess in her head
entwined on a temple wall, their limbs
gliding together like moonstone snakes
from her sleep--
Jennifer Maiden’s Selected Poems: 1967-2018 (2018), continuing without break from collection to collection, indicates the imaginative continuity in her work. That first image of light on a sea-barge, crystalline and flashing, is one matrix for the marvellous sequence of poems, ‘Birthstones’, in Jennifer Maiden’s fifth collection Birthstones (1978). And in ‘Psalm’, in The Winter Baby, Jennifer Maiden writes--
We set the heart like a ruby in a laser
to refract ceaselessly between
eye of light and eye of light
compact to the white
enth of intensity, responding
of itself, articulate
in a finger, transparent
in the skin, watching
one crimson facet only of the crystal
touching near the true point on the surface
sheer, and there the broken light begins.
The formal structure of that poem, with its long lines first contracting and then lengthening out, itself embodies the movement of light in the poem—‘eye of light and eye of light / compact’. In form, extending out and contracting in, it embodies that movement in life which she describes in ‘Second Psalm’--
We cannot incarnate ourselves too long.
It is like looking at the sun.
Our life defines itself in those
moments when it blurs and knows
that it has glanced away. Reality
is luxurious with these remissions,
they come to be used like the pauses
between labour plains and just so, their use
is learned--
Jewels incarnate, in her work, that alternation between image and story, between self-enclosed power and its history of use. In her work, through her work, she envisages this alternation as a pulse in thought—a movement inwards and back, like a swing, like a metronome.
It is a major achievement to illustrate, as she has, how thoroughly the style of a poem can be the expression of a vision. A logic, at once rigorous and inclusive, extends even to selecting the cover of her selected poems.
The back cover explains:
The cover depicts the author and a rope swing, as such a swing could represent many aspects of her work: its technical rhythmic continuity, like metronomic beats of poetry, the possibility of moving weightlessly between levels of a hierarchy in trauma, and being able to survive the problem of evil in a space between an ideal and what is real, all happening with the author keeping hold of the ropes and in control of speed and direction.
The cover is built out of multiple images of the poet, fitted together like animation stills, not to form a beautiful static composition but rather to express, even here, the poetry’s principled movement away from self-sufficient, self-enclosed images—to test how these might work in history, in thought. In ‘Icon and Iconoclasm’, her last poem in this Selected Poems, she writes against ‘the icon’ which ‘only ornaments’. The swing on the cover is, in broken images, set in motion—meant, in its crowded and disorderly here-and-thereness, to represent what she has called ‘the eternally reversing dialectic between icon and iconoclasm’. It asserts the poet’s body, her singular presence. It includes, as dark triangles between the images, those facets of a jewel which direct light out. And, in the raised limbs of the poet—one beside another, layered—the cover image recalls the poet’s Indian ancestry, in the figure of Shakti, world-mother, whose outspread arms represent her readiness to battle evil in every direction, being in motion.
Dr. Lisa Gorton is an author, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection, Press Release was awarded the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the children's novel, Cloudland. Her latest novel, The Life of Houses (2015) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award. She is currently working on a study of the writers Donne and Browne. Her latest, eagerly-awaited, poetry collection, Empirical, will be published by Giramondo.
Quemar Press is grateful to Dr. Gorton for giving us this fine analysis of Jennifer Maiden's Selected Poems 1967-2018.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
By Dr. Lisa Gorton on Jennifer Maiden's Selected Poems 1967-2018, Quemar Press, 2018
In ‘The Case of the Pharaoh’s...’, published in her collection Mines, Jennifer Maiden remembers hearing the story of an Indian ancestor--
Perhaps
embellished a little, my ancestor,
a Hindu princess, eloped with a British
civil servant and both were undone,
disinherited by their kin. Well done,
I thought, & drank to them. The Maidens
always drank red--
One of the pleasures of Jennifer Maiden’s poetry is how it tracks, moment-to-moment, the movement of thought; and it is characteristic of her thought to move from an image to an unfolding story, and from a story back to an image. In ‘Foxfall 3’ she writes that the speeches of Charles James Fox ‘built sequence and repetition like / a confident, cunning, passionate palace’—itself an image of how, in her thinking, process itself can form a monument.
Jewels, with their facets which at once gather and multiply light, become in her work an image of images. In her poem ‘The Problem of Evil’, published in her first collection Tactics: The Problem of Evil, she describes a barge below the sea-wall--
It is so crystallized by sun
that it bobs as a vat of reflections,
& flashes on the fissured
limit of its line--
From the first, in this light Jennifer Maiden sees a movement between crystalline form and outspreading flashes—and sees this movement, at once inwards and outwards, as an image of language itself, afloat on ‘the fissured limit of its line’. Jewels become in her work an image of images because they reveal in themselves this movement of concentrating and diversifying light—a movement that she plays out in her poetry as a movement from image into story, and into argument, and back to the image, freely.
The story of her Indian princess ancestor becomes an origin story for the jewels in her poetry. Disinheritance, generation—the story carries within itself that movement from ‘undone’ to ‘done’ in the poem’s two lines. So, in a poem set in the mountain ‘Jagungal’, the poem moves in and out of its jewel image--
Jagungal in now gone in mist. I fish
in my mind for exact colours. We walk
through filaments of moonstone now,
the sun becomes a moonstone at back
of Katharine and David. Long ago,
my ancestress from India wore
moonstones perhaps for sacredness.
There were a god and goddess in her head
entwined on a temple wall, their limbs
gliding together like moonstone snakes
from her sleep--
Jennifer Maiden’s Selected Poems: 1967-2018 (2018), continuing without break from collection to collection, indicates the imaginative continuity in her work. That first image of light on a sea-barge, crystalline and flashing, is one matrix for the marvellous sequence of poems, ‘Birthstones’, in Jennifer Maiden’s fifth collection Birthstones (1978). And in ‘Psalm’, in The Winter Baby, Jennifer Maiden writes--
We set the heart like a ruby in a laser
to refract ceaselessly between
eye of light and eye of light
compact to the white
enth of intensity, responding
of itself, articulate
in a finger, transparent
in the skin, watching
one crimson facet only of the crystal
touching near the true point on the surface
sheer, and there the broken light begins.
The formal structure of that poem, with its long lines first contracting and then lengthening out, itself embodies the movement of light in the poem—‘eye of light and eye of light / compact’. In form, extending out and contracting in, it embodies that movement in life which she describes in ‘Second Psalm’--
We cannot incarnate ourselves too long.
It is like looking at the sun.
Our life defines itself in those
moments when it blurs and knows
that it has glanced away. Reality
is luxurious with these remissions,
they come to be used like the pauses
between labour plains and just so, their use
is learned--
Jewels incarnate, in her work, that alternation between image and story, between self-enclosed power and its history of use. In her work, through her work, she envisages this alternation as a pulse in thought—a movement inwards and back, like a swing, like a metronome.
It is a major achievement to illustrate, as she has, how thoroughly the style of a poem can be the expression of a vision. A logic, at once rigorous and inclusive, extends even to selecting the cover of her selected poems.
The back cover explains:
The cover depicts the author and a rope swing, as such a swing could represent many aspects of her work: its technical rhythmic continuity, like metronomic beats of poetry, the possibility of moving weightlessly between levels of a hierarchy in trauma, and being able to survive the problem of evil in a space between an ideal and what is real, all happening with the author keeping hold of the ropes and in control of speed and direction.
The cover is built out of multiple images of the poet, fitted together like animation stills, not to form a beautiful static composition but rather to express, even here, the poetry’s principled movement away from self-sufficient, self-enclosed images—to test how these might work in history, in thought. In ‘Icon and Iconoclasm’, her last poem in this Selected Poems, she writes against ‘the icon’ which ‘only ornaments’. The swing on the cover is, in broken images, set in motion—meant, in its crowded and disorderly here-and-thereness, to represent what she has called ‘the eternally reversing dialectic between icon and iconoclasm’. It asserts the poet’s body, her singular presence. It includes, as dark triangles between the images, those facets of a jewel which direct light out. And, in the raised limbs of the poet—one beside another, layered—the cover image recalls the poet’s Indian ancestry, in the figure of Shakti, world-mother, whose outspread arms represent her readiness to battle evil in every direction, being in motion.
Dr. Lisa Gorton is an author, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection, Press Release was awarded the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the children's novel, Cloudland. Her latest novel, The Life of Houses (2015) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award. She is currently working on a study of the writers Donne and Browne. Her latest, eagerly-awaited, poetry collection, Empirical, will be published by Giramondo.
Quemar Press is grateful to Dr. Gorton for giving us this fine analysis of Jennifer Maiden's Selected Poems 1967-2018.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennifer Maiden reading at Don Bank, 28th November, 2018
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Danny Gardner and Jennifer Maiden at Don Bank, 28th November, 2018
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Live Poets at Don Bank. Wednesday November 28th.
by Danny Gardner, excerpt from his Facebook report:
https://www.facebook.com/livepoetsdonbank/posts/2501848349887484?__tn__=K-R
The onset of the entire rainfall for November in one day meant the weather was the winner on Live Poets' last evening of the year. Those who attended despite the evening threat of heavier downpours and hail were undoubtedly the True Believers.
…It was then time for the 'Duck River Band' who have been together the best part of a decade playing events around their local area…
It was truly an experience to savour which dissipated the gloom and warmed those arriving late through the resuming rain and churning howlbursts which had sucked at the windows of Don Bank cottage so alarmingly.
By this stage too Jennifer, god bless, had arrived safely.
My first contact with Jennifer Maiden's work was through the poem : 'Centaur' from 1974 through to the perfect Sydney post card from 'Rich Men's Houses' the fireworks of Luna Park as seen from the Opera House - except this particular 'light-up' was from the infamous Ghost Train blaze.
It was well nigh a decade since Jennifer had last read for us at Don Bank and to think the weather had almost jinxed it was cruel.
Maiden's poetry mixes the temporal with the universal, the domestic with the international, the momentous events with the instants that pass - in a lounge or in squalor - happiness or trauma.
This evening there was a special treat. Maiden's reputation has been built on her impressive canon of 24 poetry books and six novels.This night she would be reading from her brand new Selected - poems from 1967 to 2018 Jennifer had chosen herself. There was utility ahead of frills in this project from Quemar Press as Jennifer explained - minimal breaks between poems, text chock-a-block and wall-to-wall on a journey I gleefully began the following day. To have so much of her work in a single package was luxury!
In concert with one of the aims of the evening -recognition of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice - Jennifer read her poem: 'Into the Bodies of Poor Men' from the recently released antho: 'To End all Wars' from Puncher and Wattman, She followed that with a poem about 'Kevin Barry' a hero of the Irish. 'Positional Asphyxia' was prompted by seeing the massacre of children in Qana. A poem concerning Julian Assange's situation 'My Heart has an Embassy' followed. Then a reference to Dorothy Hewett being compared to the White Rose of Stalingrad in the poem: 'Lily' and a piece from her novel 'Play with Knives'. There were intimations of Baghdad in 'Potted Palm in the Al-Rashid Hotel Foyer'. In further deference to the First World War 'Princip in Sarajevo' chilled with the knowledge that Prince Ferdinand was killed at the SECOND opportunity once the first pass of the square had 'failed' - what went through the mind of the assassin in the interim one wondered? 'Menopause as a Bee Freed from a Fairy Floss Machine' ends with the poet's wish to fly up with her daughter on her back in 'an arc of freedom (like the bee had done from its sticky prison) 'two children oblivious to blood.'
…
Because there would be a 3 month break before we met again the rest of the Open Section followed. Ed Wilson read a poem he had written as an 'Eileen' which, several decades ago, had led to him being 'excommunicated' from the poetry scene at large. He always remembered Jennifer's support as a reviewer at that time - and now read that poem 'where he had gone wrong' in her honour…
Outside thankfully the rain had finally rumbled off. Guitar music materialised as supper was consumed and singalongs were snapped with groups of revellers saluting this and that. Jennifer joined the throng as hymns and other anthems struggled to be successfully borne.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Lisa Gorton:
"I was so pleased to discover the work of Vera Rudner; a great discovery… Thank you! How impressively strong her work is - its shadows, and volumes of air, as real as the things in it - shapes of space, and air, and dark, and light, held not only within but all around its vessels, making the artwork itself a container of reality. I am struck by how that first configuration of curves and shadow - recurs in later artworks - & gains, with all its reality, a sort of dream force, talismanic.
Against the singular presence of her artworks, your ekphrasis - in prose and poetry - tracking moment-to-moment perception - track a different way of being alive in time. I am disturbed by the destruction of her painting. The grandchildren had a true perception - the painting was frightening, of course. Why not? But to destroy something of such singular presence and sorrow and truth! I find myself trying to envisage that act of violence and desecration.
I hope that your book about Vera Rudner will restitute that recognition, which her work deserves."
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Andrea Goldsmith:
"Vera Rudner. She’s new to me - so it is truly a gift. I really love her work, am so sorry that she stopped after Sacrilege - and what sacrilege that the larger version of the work was BURNED. It scared the kiddies? Come on!
...Since August 1st I’ve returned to Vera Rudner. What a woman. thank you (again) so much for introducing her to me."
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Joanne Burns:
"Vera Rudner's book is most interesting...particularly drawn to 'Suburbia' and 'Be Back in the Morning'. Haunting! The history of Vera's art is compelling too. That fate of 'sacrilege' on Norfolk Island! We once went to a talk by Agapitos and Wilson, that accompanied an exhibition of artworks from their Australian Surrealist collection, at the S.H. Ervin gallery - a number of years ago."
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Jan Owen:
"I so have enjoyed reading your fine translation of Gugemer; it’s like travelling back to that era, and I really admire your skill at translating such early French literature with both accuracy and grace. It’s a reminder, and an example, of how compelling narrative poetry can be."
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"I so have enjoyed reading your fine translation of Gugemer; it’s like travelling back to that era, and I really admire your skill at translating such early French literature with both accuracy and grace. It’s a reminder, and an example, of how compelling narrative poetry can be."
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power Newcastle Launch
The transcript of the launch, including a Q&A between the interviewer Magdalena Ball and the author Jennifer Maiden, and an introduction by publisher Katharine Margot Toohey, is available by clicking on the title below:
Appalachian Fall Newcastle Launch Transcript
The text of the three poems read at the launching are available in the Appalachian Fall sampler for free download on the Books for Purchase page.
Magdalena Ball's Compulsive Reader has a complete audio recording of the event at:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader/2018/02/14/jennifer-maiden-launches-her-poetry-book-appalachian-fall
The transcript of the launch, including a Q&A between the interviewer Magdalena Ball and the author Jennifer Maiden, and an introduction by publisher Katharine Margot Toohey, is available by clicking on the title below:
Appalachian Fall Newcastle Launch Transcript
The text of the three poems read at the launching are available in the Appalachian Fall sampler for free download on the Books for Purchase page.
Magdalena Ball's Compulsive Reader has a complete audio recording of the event at:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader/2018/02/14/jennifer-maiden-launches-her-poetry-book-appalachian-fall
Jennifer Maiden, Magdalena Ball and Katharine Margot Toohey
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
New comments on Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power:
The experienced and respected critic and poet, Geoff Page, reviewed Appalachian Fall in the paper edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, and Fairfax papers online, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Brisbane Times.
Below is an excerpt:
'Appalachian Fall review: Jennifer Maiden's morally complex poetry
Geoff Page
POETRY
Appalachian Fall: Poems about Poverty in Power
Jennifer Maiden
Quemar Press, $21
...Its predecessor, The Metronome, was finished on the night of Donald Trump's election last November. Now, a year later, with a new publisher, she has plunged into the "Trump Era" and, needless to say, it's not exactly as we might have predicted...
In this new book, Maiden's main interest is in poverty (particularly in the US) and what poverty wants when it gets into power (or thinks it has). She is not interested in a straightforward denunciation of Trump (that would be far too easy)...
Appalachian Fall, with its implied dystopian contrast to Aaron Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring, readily satisfies the expectations that Maiden's intrigued and loyal readers have developed since Friendly Fire back in 2005.'
The entire review is available at:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/appalachian-fall-review-jennifer-maidens-morally-complex-poetry-20171124-gzsizc.html
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Below is an excerpt:
'Appalachian Fall review: Jennifer Maiden's morally complex poetry
Geoff Page
POETRY
Appalachian Fall: Poems about Poverty in Power
Jennifer Maiden
Quemar Press, $21
...Its predecessor, The Metronome, was finished on the night of Donald Trump's election last November. Now, a year later, with a new publisher, she has plunged into the "Trump Era" and, needless to say, it's not exactly as we might have predicted...
In this new book, Maiden's main interest is in poverty (particularly in the US) and what poverty wants when it gets into power (or thinks it has). She is not interested in a straightforward denunciation of Trump (that would be far too easy)...
Appalachian Fall, with its implied dystopian contrast to Aaron Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring, readily satisfies the expectations that Maiden's intrigued and loyal readers have developed since Friendly Fire back in 2005.'
The entire review is available at:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/appalachian-fall-review-jennifer-maidens-morally-complex-poetry-20171124-gzsizc.html
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The critic, Magdalena Ball, has written a brilliant, sharply focused review, which appeared in the online Review, Compulsive Reader.
It is excerpted below:
Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power
By Jennifer Maiden
Quemar Press
2018, ISBN: 978-0-9954181-7-2 (pbk, $18.50aud), Electronic Edition ISBN: 978-0-9954181-8-9 (ebook, $5aud), 2018, 150pages
Anyone who thinks of poetry as a hermetic art form has not read Jennifer Maiden. A keen and articulate observer of current affairs and trends, Maiden’s work explores a political and sociological landscape through the lens of poetic vision. This analysis takes many forms, often in multi-genred pieces that transcend essay, fiction, biography and poetry. In spite of the mixed literary forms, there is a consistency in characters, themes, and in approaches across Maiden’s oeuvre that makes for an accumulative effect. Once we know, for example, George and Clare, or Maiden’s fictionalised Hilary Clinton, their reappearance in new work immediately conjures a backstory. That said, the poems in Maiden’s latest poetry book, Appalachian Fall, work fine as individual pieces.
As the title makes clear, Appalachian Fall explores, among other things, Donald Trump’s 2017 election, particularly against impact of poverty and disenfranchisement. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton sixty-three percent to thirty-three percent in Appalachia, the cultural region of the US stretching from southern New York to northern Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia associated with a failing mining industry, low levels of education and rampant poverty. Maiden explores this statistic as only a poet can, with a lyrical perspective that blurs the boundary between mythology and emotional fact, and invites the reader to empathise with its subjects. Maiden often puts real-life political figures, poets, and celebrities together in incongruous ways in her work, fictionalising them and opening a conversation that begins with the protagonist waking in the midst of some event...
The rhythm and structure of the poems, as with many of the poems in this collection, is discursive, almost dialectical. The conversations that take place within the poems allows for a measured analysis which is both empathetic and complex. Nothing is black and white, and rhythm and progression is as important in the work as political exploration. The poems move in and out of the political arena, allowing for complexity, and often bringing in the personal. The connection between Art and world events is explored meta-poetically, combining biography and lived experience with intellectual analysis and the richness of poetic imagery:
We should discuss
how my belief – no longer just a theory – that poetry
is digital technology and therefore that the internet
embodies it as wholly as a singer with a harp,
an ancient bard obsessed with the mnemonic, means
the experience electronically is gnostic: direct
summoning of the divine, unlike the paper book,
which is a sacred object and a conduit, not a baby
touching its mother’s face. ("Diary Poem: Uses of Book Piety")
...There are also references to Martha Graham’s ballet of Aaron Copland’s composition Appalachian Spring. The rhythms of many of these poems seem to conjure tonal variations of Copland’s music – the simple melodies and chord variations, the repetitions, alliterations, and the rolling quality of the iambs:
What songs of use fall gold for its famished creatures:
that moonless one, so far, that stole the future, or
the sunless one, so close, that stole a child? ("Diary Poem: Uses of the Appalachian Fall")
In a way that Maiden is particularly good at, US, UK and Australian politics are conjoined and brought back to the level of the domestic...
The idea of Art’s role in the world, in a political frame, and especially at the point of apocalypse runs like a thread through the work... The state of Australian publishing gets a swipe in reference to Maiden’s own publishing trials, in terms of what is and isn’t commercial, attractive, and powerful:
O Frightened Lady: let
my work be as posed as real insurrection, let my threat
be in positioning, not diction, an equality in stature
with the weakness I enshroud. One makes a threat
from below or above, not looking in the eyes. One
could
look in the eyes from where I stood:
sometimes the eye had power,
but it stored its waiting message in the blood. ("Posing a political threat")
In these poems, American politics remains present but is also a counterpoint to the timelessness of artistic endeavour. Maiden brings in the work of her referents in a way that deepens the perspective and turns the immediate into the universal as it works against the repetition and progression of history, in a way which maintains a strong sense of wry humour throughout... a multi-layered, complex and powerful book that crosses genre and illuminates the state of the human race in all its frail, dangerous beauty.
The entire review is available at:
http://www.compulsivereader.com/2018/01/07/a-review-of-appalachian-fall-by-jennifer-maiden/
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It is excerpted below:
Appalachian Fall: Poems About Poverty in Power
By Jennifer Maiden
Quemar Press
2018, ISBN: 978-0-9954181-7-2 (pbk, $18.50aud), Electronic Edition ISBN: 978-0-9954181-8-9 (ebook, $5aud), 2018, 150pages
Anyone who thinks of poetry as a hermetic art form has not read Jennifer Maiden. A keen and articulate observer of current affairs and trends, Maiden’s work explores a political and sociological landscape through the lens of poetic vision. This analysis takes many forms, often in multi-genred pieces that transcend essay, fiction, biography and poetry. In spite of the mixed literary forms, there is a consistency in characters, themes, and in approaches across Maiden’s oeuvre that makes for an accumulative effect. Once we know, for example, George and Clare, or Maiden’s fictionalised Hilary Clinton, their reappearance in new work immediately conjures a backstory. That said, the poems in Maiden’s latest poetry book, Appalachian Fall, work fine as individual pieces.
As the title makes clear, Appalachian Fall explores, among other things, Donald Trump’s 2017 election, particularly against impact of poverty and disenfranchisement. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton sixty-three percent to thirty-three percent in Appalachia, the cultural region of the US stretching from southern New York to northern Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia associated with a failing mining industry, low levels of education and rampant poverty. Maiden explores this statistic as only a poet can, with a lyrical perspective that blurs the boundary between mythology and emotional fact, and invites the reader to empathise with its subjects. Maiden often puts real-life political figures, poets, and celebrities together in incongruous ways in her work, fictionalising them and opening a conversation that begins with the protagonist waking in the midst of some event...
The rhythm and structure of the poems, as with many of the poems in this collection, is discursive, almost dialectical. The conversations that take place within the poems allows for a measured analysis which is both empathetic and complex. Nothing is black and white, and rhythm and progression is as important in the work as political exploration. The poems move in and out of the political arena, allowing for complexity, and often bringing in the personal. The connection between Art and world events is explored meta-poetically, combining biography and lived experience with intellectual analysis and the richness of poetic imagery:
We should discuss
how my belief – no longer just a theory – that poetry
is digital technology and therefore that the internet
embodies it as wholly as a singer with a harp,
an ancient bard obsessed with the mnemonic, means
the experience electronically is gnostic: direct
summoning of the divine, unlike the paper book,
which is a sacred object and a conduit, not a baby
touching its mother’s face. ("Diary Poem: Uses of Book Piety")
...There are also references to Martha Graham’s ballet of Aaron Copland’s composition Appalachian Spring. The rhythms of many of these poems seem to conjure tonal variations of Copland’s music – the simple melodies and chord variations, the repetitions, alliterations, and the rolling quality of the iambs:
What songs of use fall gold for its famished creatures:
that moonless one, so far, that stole the future, or
the sunless one, so close, that stole a child? ("Diary Poem: Uses of the Appalachian Fall")
In a way that Maiden is particularly good at, US, UK and Australian politics are conjoined and brought back to the level of the domestic...
The idea of Art’s role in the world, in a political frame, and especially at the point of apocalypse runs like a thread through the work... The state of Australian publishing gets a swipe in reference to Maiden’s own publishing trials, in terms of what is and isn’t commercial, attractive, and powerful:
O Frightened Lady: let
my work be as posed as real insurrection, let my threat
be in positioning, not diction, an equality in stature
with the weakness I enshroud. One makes a threat
from below or above, not looking in the eyes. One
could
look in the eyes from where I stood:
sometimes the eye had power,
but it stored its waiting message in the blood. ("Posing a political threat")
In these poems, American politics remains present but is also a counterpoint to the timelessness of artistic endeavour. Maiden brings in the work of her referents in a way that deepens the perspective and turns the immediate into the universal as it works against the repetition and progression of history, in a way which maintains a strong sense of wry humour throughout... a multi-layered, complex and powerful book that crosses genre and illuminates the state of the human race in all its frail, dangerous beauty.
The entire review is available at:
http://www.compulsivereader.com/2018/01/07/a-review-of-appalachian-fall-by-jennifer-maiden/
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The expert poet, Tim Thorne, wrote:
'I have read Appalachian Fall (great title) and enjoyed it immensely... I always look forward to Jennifer Maiden's conversations between prominent figures across the decades. They are always thought provoking and entertaining. Sometimes the choice of characters makes for one of those delightful surprises that has the reader saying, "How bizarre an idea, but how perfectly appropriate." Such is the dialogue in Appalachian Fall between Jane Austen and Tanya Plibersek. The wide ranging roll-call also includes Kenneth Slessor, Martin Indyk, Dylan Thomas and many more. There are also two blistering poems on Spain/Catalonia, one of which in particular, "The Civil Guard: 2", shows that Maiden's talents go way beyond the discursive to the ferociously lyrical.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'I have read Appalachian Fall (great title) and enjoyed it immensely... I always look forward to Jennifer Maiden's conversations between prominent figures across the decades. They are always thought provoking and entertaining. Sometimes the choice of characters makes for one of those delightful surprises that has the reader saying, "How bizarre an idea, but how perfectly appropriate." Such is the dialogue in Appalachian Fall between Jane Austen and Tanya Plibersek. The wide ranging roll-call also includes Kenneth Slessor, Martin Indyk, Dylan Thomas and many more. There are also two blistering poems on Spain/Catalonia, one of which in particular, "The Civil Guard: 2", shows that Maiden's talents go way beyond the discursive to the ferociously lyrical.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Writer and critic, Lisa Gorton, wrote superbly:
'For me, reading... [this] work is like entering into a way of thinking, balanced and free, unhurried, but with jumps in it. It is restorative... The work is a pleasure to read and hold.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'For me, reading... [this] work is like entering into a way of thinking, balanced and free, unhurried, but with jumps in it. It is restorative... The work is a pleasure to read and hold.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Accomplished poet and translator, Jan Owen, wrote:
'Brilliant... there is a/the whole bright-dark world in your book – it is... a confronting, challenging, joyous read. One phrase I remember... where you said you do not have courage. I don’t agree!'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'Brilliant... there is a/the whole bright-dark world in your book – it is... a confronting, challenging, joyous read. One phrase I remember... where you said you do not have courage. I don’t agree!'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jonathan Shaw, the popular and well-read critic stated:
''I love the book, and have read it a number of times, as well as exploring the world of references in it'.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
''I love the book, and have read it a number of times, as well as exploring the world of references in it'.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gig Ryan, the fine poet and critic, wrote:
'These melodiously patterned poems, some even in strict rhyming schemes, bear conversations like a covenant through time. A little like Aristophanes' "Frogs" in which Dionysus travels to the underworld seeking to revive the brilliant Euripides, so Maiden's figures reach into the past that has formed them, consulting those of an alternative, perhaps even timeless, power. In musings between writers and politicians (such as Jane Austen and Tanya Plibersek), between thought and action, Maiden unwinds the casual immoralities of power. Her recurring couple, George and Clare continue to observe and comment like a Greek chorus. There are also travels through the poet's own past in some broody piercing elegies, musing between life and death; but perhaps most miraculously Maiden also succeeds in adding real dimension to the received cartoon of Donald Trump.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
'These melodiously patterned poems, some even in strict rhyming schemes, bear conversations like a covenant through time. A little like Aristophanes' "Frogs" in which Dionysus travels to the underworld seeking to revive the brilliant Euripides, so Maiden's figures reach into the past that has formed them, consulting those of an alternative, perhaps even timeless, power. In musings between writers and politicians (such as Jane Austen and Tanya Plibersek), between thought and action, Maiden unwinds the casual immoralities of power. Her recurring couple, George and Clare continue to observe and comment like a Greek chorus. There are also travels through the poet's own past in some broody piercing elegies, musing between life and death; but perhaps most miraculously Maiden also succeeds in adding real dimension to the received cartoon of Donald Trump.'
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Australian author Andrea Goldsmith made a response to Play With Knives: Four, and it could also describe something for which Quemar itself is striving: 'Artists and writers have always had to be strong. The rewards are few, the slights are many, but unless you want to repeat what others have done, it is the work itself that makes the greatest demands. There is a fearless quality to Maiden's work that Dorothy Porter always admired.'
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Quemar would also like to thank readers for their warm response to our completed translations available for free download, including Aucassin and Nicolette, of which the noted Australian poet and French translator Jan Owen has written:
I’ve just downloaded Jennifer Maiden's novels and Katharine’s lively and graceful translations... So thank you both! I started Aucassin and Nicolette just to get a preliminary idea but then had to read right on through. It is so touching and magical, the e-book equivalent of a page-turner... translating a love story as a labour of love must have helped her capture the right tone, and also that balance of grace and intensity.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I’ve just downloaded Jennifer Maiden's novels and Katharine’s lively and graceful translations... So thank you both! I started Aucassin and Nicolette just to get a preliminary idea but then had to read right on through. It is so touching and magical, the e-book equivalent of a page-turner... translating a love story as a labour of love must have helped her capture the right tone, and also that balance of grace and intensity.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Lisa Gorton on Jennifer Maiden's Play With Knives novels, The Metronome collection and poetry
On Jennifer Maiden for Quemar Press
One and zero. Jennifer Maiden has written that ‘poetry is digital technology,/ its history/ is digital, its form finger-disparate, but/ communicated by the binary…’ (‘The Year of the Ox’). This vision is essential to the poetry collections that she has written in sequence over more than a decade, from Friendly Fire to The Metronome, which together form one of the masterpieces of this age. For Maiden, form is not a technical exercise or traditional achievement, but a shaping principle of thought. Like the gyre for Yeats, Maiden’s principle of the binary shapes every element of her poetry: its alternating formal structures, its patterns of question and response, its quick shifts in tone, attention, place, and time. Forever taking energy from what might seem their polar opposites, her poems are political but also lyrical, lyrical but not escapist, conversational but also idiosyncratic. With characteristic self-awareness, she describes herself ‘trying / to construct, in my endless quest, / the perfect lyric and involve Abu Ghraib’.
The philosopher Plotinus invented a spiritual geometry of the One. For him, this One meant all potentiality: complete in itself, sufficient to itself, undiminishing, by its own nature radiant, radiating outwards across creation and time: ‘the Many’. The One is the centre of a circle: indivisible, yet generative. 'We ought not even to say that he will see, but that he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one’ (Enneads). For Maiden, one and zero have a similar philosophical charge. At once opposed and interdependent, they structure the relationship between history and potential. They are memory and forgetting, empathy and detachment, action and reaction, present and future. In her latest poetry collection, The Metronome, they are the rhythms and repetitions built into these poems, history’s pendulum swings, and stop-start heartbeats.
‘What is our innocence,/ what is our guilt? All are/ naked, none is safe. And whence/ is courage: the unanswered question,/ the resolute doubt…’ With these questions, Marianne Moore opens her great poem ‘What are years’. These questions lie at the heart of Jennifer Maiden’s work, also; and, like Moore, Maiden in her syntax traces out the digressive and sometimes leaping, moment-by-moment movement of thought.
For much of her writing life, Maiden has been thinking about, and through, two characters: Clare, who as a nine-year-old murdered her younger siblings, and later devoted her life to saving victims of state violence, and George, her probation officer.
'For a time it stared at me – after the sound ‘psychopath’ – and then her eyes relaxed. We studied each other without tension, while I formally introduced myself:
''I’m George Jeffreys.'' Despite my ancestor, a namesake who was the Hanging Judge at the Monmouth Rebellion Assizes, I do regret the name ''George''. But I compensate with an impressive sibilant hiss on the last syllable of my surname when I choose. I chose.'
The vigilance of that first meeting holds throughout their lives together. Maiden first considered these characters in her novel Play with Knives, written in the 1980s, published in abridged form in 1990 and now in revised form on Quemar’s website in 2016. Maiden continued their story in Play with Knives: Two: Complicity, written in 1990-1991, but published for the first time on Quemar’s website in 2016. Now her verse and prose novel, Play with Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, brings these characters into the present.
From Friendly Fire (2005) to The Metronome (2016; 2017), Maiden’s poetry collections also give voice to these characters. They are both lovers and activists, and in their relationship they model how Maiden brings lyric and satiric modes together. Maiden has remarked in an online interview that Clare needs George because he never forgives her: the love that Clare seeks is not separate from justice (https://vimeo.com/200746566). Clare’s and George’s relationship is charged with this tension. ‘You were never/ concerned at all with whether I was sorry,’ says Clare. ‘You know I/ was, but that it didn’t signify, and the children’s deaths/ were what I’d have to carry, with me like a special weight/ from hell.’
Maiden’s works alike hold in tension between poetry and prose. Switching between different modes of speech and ways of noticing, they are alternately abrupt, digressive, rapturous, prosaic, intimate and coolly detached. George and Clare are perpetually alert to the play of love and power in their relationship. Through their interactions, Maiden considers George’s theory of trauma: that it ‘results in compulsively changing places, up/ and down in a hierarchy, and that also this included one shifting/ fearfully between objective and subjective...’ In the novels, Maiden often takes George’s perspective; in the poems, she places him in the third person. But in both modes she works with sudden free shifts of perspective, vital to her vision of how art works as a movement between outside and inside points of view, perspectives of justice and compassion. Clare is watching George sleep. ‘One minute she saw him as he was, but/ in a painting, from a distance, say a Wright of Derby in which/ astute observers gather around a candlelit experiment… But then her sight turned so subjective that she/ saw the scene in pieces: his lips, his nose, his eyelids…’
In Friendly Fire, Maiden suggests that she brought these characters from her fiction into her poetry so that,
'with the freedom of fiction, the horror-inhibited portions of my brain might speak. This also made sense since the almost universal response to September 11 was that it seemed like fiction. To enter and use that response rather than resist it might have a particular value …'
So, in Friendly Fire, George Jeffreys is in New York on September 11 looking for his lover, Clare:
'People were gathering, covered in dust and ash, their grey outlines reminding me of Pompeii, or something Eugene McCarthy had said, staring down from his hotel room at the Chicago Riots, that it was "like a ballet of purgatory". It was like a great ballet, too, in that all movements seemed to exist for themselves, like those of animals, with no analogous meaning.'
Clare walks out of the confusion and the two of them head back to their hotel room. In bed together, they discuss the consequences: the urge for retribution turning to war: ‘they need to see an execution, and war isn’t about that: it’s about war and it always disappoints you.’ And so it starts: ‘George Jeffreys woke up in Kabul./ George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed / as usual with Baghdad... .’
From the first, Maiden’s novels have taken a steady interest in violence, its motives and its consequences. They are—and seek to be—uneasy and unsettling. Play with Knives starts: ‘I will meditate simply, in Yeats’ words, upon wounds and blood’. With needling intelligence, Maiden considers, in these works, what virtue is, and empathy. She wants to consider how these might persist, not in protected domestic retreats, but in a state of exception as Giorgio Agamben defines it. In Clare, she takes up a character who has made herself intimate with violence. Clare has been violent, and she has suffered violence. Through both Clare’s guilt and Clare’s compassion, Maiden brings the knowledge of state violence into kitchens and bedrooms and loving human relationships.
In Play with Knives: Three: Clare and George and the Grey Hat Hacker, Clare and George have sex while they’re waiting for news of the execution of prisoners in Indonesia. The news will come through the television or over the telephone—forms which have distance written into their names. But both Clare and George believe themselves to be in love with one of the prisoners to be killed and that state violence, though carried out at a distance, intimately shapes their union. Clare says, ‘…this room isn’t a room. It seems/ to be the killing ground again.’
Clare and George are minding a house in Thirroul—the small seaside town where D.H. and Frieda Lawrence stayed while he was writing Kangaroo. Brett Whiteley and Garry Shead made paintings about D.H. and Frieda Lawrence there; Brett Whiteley died in the Beach Motel, Thirroul; Shead’s pictures of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence line the walls of the room where Clare and George have sex. Throughout this novel, Maiden considers Lawrence’s notion of ‘sexual passion as a solution/ for industrialisation and property’. Clare and George both seek and model ‘that sudden quiet intimacy of discourse which preserves/ the future of humanity intact…’
In their talk they are always testing art against their daily tasks, their sexual experience, and their responses to political events. Alongside D.H Lawrence, they consider, for instance, the Marquis de Sade, Julian Assange, Cicely Barker, Kenneth Tynan, Stevie Smith, and pre-Hays Code Hollywood movies. Maiden teases out such connections quizzically, slowly, in free verse: testing out discrepancies and illuminations. In this way, she suggests that art is part of that ‘intimacy of discourse which preserves/the future of humanity’—part of its binary, a call and response, a movement between subjective and objective modes.
It is not essential to read these novels to comprehend the brilliant sequence of poetry collections which feature George and Clare, from Friendly Fire to The Metronome. But with the novels, the study of love and violence in the story of George and Clare finds its closest and most intimate, most unsettling expression.
Dr. Lisa Gorton is an author, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection, Press Release was awarded the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the children's novel, Cloudland. Her latest novel, The Life of Houses (2015) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award. She is currently working on a study of the writers Donne and Browne.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
One and zero. Jennifer Maiden has written that ‘poetry is digital technology,/ its history/ is digital, its form finger-disparate, but/ communicated by the binary…’ (‘The Year of the Ox’). This vision is essential to the poetry collections that she has written in sequence over more than a decade, from Friendly Fire to The Metronome, which together form one of the masterpieces of this age. For Maiden, form is not a technical exercise or traditional achievement, but a shaping principle of thought. Like the gyre for Yeats, Maiden’s principle of the binary shapes every element of her poetry: its alternating formal structures, its patterns of question and response, its quick shifts in tone, attention, place, and time. Forever taking energy from what might seem their polar opposites, her poems are political but also lyrical, lyrical but not escapist, conversational but also idiosyncratic. With characteristic self-awareness, she describes herself ‘trying / to construct, in my endless quest, / the perfect lyric and involve Abu Ghraib’.
The philosopher Plotinus invented a spiritual geometry of the One. For him, this One meant all potentiality: complete in itself, sufficient to itself, undiminishing, by its own nature radiant, radiating outwards across creation and time: ‘the Many’. The One is the centre of a circle: indivisible, yet generative. 'We ought not even to say that he will see, but that he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one’ (Enneads). For Maiden, one and zero have a similar philosophical charge. At once opposed and interdependent, they structure the relationship between history and potential. They are memory and forgetting, empathy and detachment, action and reaction, present and future. In her latest poetry collection, The Metronome, they are the rhythms and repetitions built into these poems, history’s pendulum swings, and stop-start heartbeats.
‘What is our innocence,/ what is our guilt? All are/ naked, none is safe. And whence/ is courage: the unanswered question,/ the resolute doubt…’ With these questions, Marianne Moore opens her great poem ‘What are years’. These questions lie at the heart of Jennifer Maiden’s work, also; and, like Moore, Maiden in her syntax traces out the digressive and sometimes leaping, moment-by-moment movement of thought.
For much of her writing life, Maiden has been thinking about, and through, two characters: Clare, who as a nine-year-old murdered her younger siblings, and later devoted her life to saving victims of state violence, and George, her probation officer.
'For a time it stared at me – after the sound ‘psychopath’ – and then her eyes relaxed. We studied each other without tension, while I formally introduced myself:
''I’m George Jeffreys.'' Despite my ancestor, a namesake who was the Hanging Judge at the Monmouth Rebellion Assizes, I do regret the name ''George''. But I compensate with an impressive sibilant hiss on the last syllable of my surname when I choose. I chose.'
The vigilance of that first meeting holds throughout their lives together. Maiden first considered these characters in her novel Play with Knives, written in the 1980s, published in abridged form in 1990 and now in revised form on Quemar’s website in 2016. Maiden continued their story in Play with Knives: Two: Complicity, written in 1990-1991, but published for the first time on Quemar’s website in 2016. Now her verse and prose novel, Play with Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker, brings these characters into the present.
From Friendly Fire (2005) to The Metronome (2016; 2017), Maiden’s poetry collections also give voice to these characters. They are both lovers and activists, and in their relationship they model how Maiden brings lyric and satiric modes together. Maiden has remarked in an online interview that Clare needs George because he never forgives her: the love that Clare seeks is not separate from justice (https://vimeo.com/200746566). Clare’s and George’s relationship is charged with this tension. ‘You were never/ concerned at all with whether I was sorry,’ says Clare. ‘You know I/ was, but that it didn’t signify, and the children’s deaths/ were what I’d have to carry, with me like a special weight/ from hell.’
Maiden’s works alike hold in tension between poetry and prose. Switching between different modes of speech and ways of noticing, they are alternately abrupt, digressive, rapturous, prosaic, intimate and coolly detached. George and Clare are perpetually alert to the play of love and power in their relationship. Through their interactions, Maiden considers George’s theory of trauma: that it ‘results in compulsively changing places, up/ and down in a hierarchy, and that also this included one shifting/ fearfully between objective and subjective...’ In the novels, Maiden often takes George’s perspective; in the poems, she places him in the third person. But in both modes she works with sudden free shifts of perspective, vital to her vision of how art works as a movement between outside and inside points of view, perspectives of justice and compassion. Clare is watching George sleep. ‘One minute she saw him as he was, but/ in a painting, from a distance, say a Wright of Derby in which/ astute observers gather around a candlelit experiment… But then her sight turned so subjective that she/ saw the scene in pieces: his lips, his nose, his eyelids…’
In Friendly Fire, Maiden suggests that she brought these characters from her fiction into her poetry so that,
'with the freedom of fiction, the horror-inhibited portions of my brain might speak. This also made sense since the almost universal response to September 11 was that it seemed like fiction. To enter and use that response rather than resist it might have a particular value …'
So, in Friendly Fire, George Jeffreys is in New York on September 11 looking for his lover, Clare:
'People were gathering, covered in dust and ash, their grey outlines reminding me of Pompeii, or something Eugene McCarthy had said, staring down from his hotel room at the Chicago Riots, that it was "like a ballet of purgatory". It was like a great ballet, too, in that all movements seemed to exist for themselves, like those of animals, with no analogous meaning.'
Clare walks out of the confusion and the two of them head back to their hotel room. In bed together, they discuss the consequences: the urge for retribution turning to war: ‘they need to see an execution, and war isn’t about that: it’s about war and it always disappoints you.’ And so it starts: ‘George Jeffreys woke up in Kabul./ George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed / as usual with Baghdad... .’
From the first, Maiden’s novels have taken a steady interest in violence, its motives and its consequences. They are—and seek to be—uneasy and unsettling. Play with Knives starts: ‘I will meditate simply, in Yeats’ words, upon wounds and blood’. With needling intelligence, Maiden considers, in these works, what virtue is, and empathy. She wants to consider how these might persist, not in protected domestic retreats, but in a state of exception as Giorgio Agamben defines it. In Clare, she takes up a character who has made herself intimate with violence. Clare has been violent, and she has suffered violence. Through both Clare’s guilt and Clare’s compassion, Maiden brings the knowledge of state violence into kitchens and bedrooms and loving human relationships.
In Play with Knives: Three: Clare and George and the Grey Hat Hacker, Clare and George have sex while they’re waiting for news of the execution of prisoners in Indonesia. The news will come through the television or over the telephone—forms which have distance written into their names. But both Clare and George believe themselves to be in love with one of the prisoners to be killed and that state violence, though carried out at a distance, intimately shapes their union. Clare says, ‘…this room isn’t a room. It seems/ to be the killing ground again.’
Clare and George are minding a house in Thirroul—the small seaside town where D.H. and Frieda Lawrence stayed while he was writing Kangaroo. Brett Whiteley and Garry Shead made paintings about D.H. and Frieda Lawrence there; Brett Whiteley died in the Beach Motel, Thirroul; Shead’s pictures of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence line the walls of the room where Clare and George have sex. Throughout this novel, Maiden considers Lawrence’s notion of ‘sexual passion as a solution/ for industrialisation and property’. Clare and George both seek and model ‘that sudden quiet intimacy of discourse which preserves/ the future of humanity intact…’
In their talk they are always testing art against their daily tasks, their sexual experience, and their responses to political events. Alongside D.H Lawrence, they consider, for instance, the Marquis de Sade, Julian Assange, Cicely Barker, Kenneth Tynan, Stevie Smith, and pre-Hays Code Hollywood movies. Maiden teases out such connections quizzically, slowly, in free verse: testing out discrepancies and illuminations. In this way, she suggests that art is part of that ‘intimacy of discourse which preserves/the future of humanity’—part of its binary, a call and response, a movement between subjective and objective modes.
It is not essential to read these novels to comprehend the brilliant sequence of poetry collections which feature George and Clare, from Friendly Fire to The Metronome. But with the novels, the study of love and violence in the story of George and Clare finds its closest and most intimate, most unsettling expression.
Dr. Lisa Gorton is an author, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her first poetry collection, Press Release was awarded the Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the children's novel, Cloudland. Her latest novel, The Life of Houses (2015) won the Prime Minister's Literary Award. She is currently working on a study of the writers Donne and Browne.
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Quemar Press is grateful to Dr. Gorton for her piece above, which discusses Jennifer Maiden's Play With Knives series and poetry so eloquently.
Quemar is also grateful for other responses to Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker. The author Anna Couani called the novel 'Compelling', while the poet Tim Thorne has written: 'I love the way it flows on so smoothly from the earlier parts of the trilogy and yet has so many (and such apt) contemporary references. A great achievement.'
Author and critic, Magdalena Ball, wrote a strong review of the Play With Knives trilogy. Her piece is excerpted below.
Quemar is also grateful for other responses to Play With Knives: Three: George and Clare and the Grey Hat Hacker. The author Anna Couani called the novel 'Compelling', while the poet Tim Thorne has written: 'I love the way it flows on so smoothly from the earlier parts of the trilogy and yet has so many (and such apt) contemporary references. A great achievement.'
Author and critic, Magdalena Ball, wrote a strong review of the Play With Knives trilogy. Her piece is excerpted below.
All three novels explore guilt and innocence, good and evil, and the individual versus the state or government, using changing tense and viewpoints. The grand conception is fairly ambitious, but Maiden handles it all smoothly and the stories read like ordinary thrillers. The binaries that charge these books are played with in all sorts of interesting ways as the characters swap positions, power matrices, emotional landscapes, and unravel the structures in which they work...
Clare is the most interesting of the characters and she develops and changes both mentally and physically through the three books. When we first meet her in Play With Knives, she’s a white haired sixteen year old who has been incarcerated for nine years for having killed her three step-siblings – a boy and two girls... The reader’s experience of Clare develops through the increasingly entangled observations of George, her probation officer. The relationship between these two characters is so compelling that it takes on many shapes throughout the three works, and indeed in many of Maiden’s poems over the years. Clare and George become the moral compass of the work – as they seek their own form of restitution, move through different locations, and continue to touch base with one another...
All of the books are intertwined, following a series of threads that are developed further with each story, bringing in elements of domesticity, motherhood, and love. Maiden doesn’t flinch at exploring the complexity of violence, war, displacement and grief, or bringing in real life characters... into the narrative. At no point does Maiden overly simplify the issues she explores, whether it’s the implications of love and intimacy, or the morality of war, refugees, or the nature of violence and suffering.
Throughout all three books, there’s a richness to the language that draws on Maiden’s poetic skill and linguistic precision.
The multi-genres novels contain elements of the thriller, mystery, and romance, all of which keep the reading fast paced, though they’re very much theme driven and literary, referencing many external texts including music, other classic fictions (D H Lawrence is particularly important in the third book), and paintings, post-modern repetitions, and self-referentiality...
Taken collectively, the Play With Knives trilogy represents engrossing reading that takes the reader to new places from both a literary and a political/theoretical perspective. The moral terrain that Maiden explores remains as relevant today as they were when the first books were originally written.
Excerpted from the online review, Compulsive Reader: http://www.compulsivereader.com/2017/02/11/a-review-of-the-play-with-knives-trilogy-by-jennifer-maiden/
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Clare is the most interesting of the characters and she develops and changes both mentally and physically through the three books. When we first meet her in Play With Knives, she’s a white haired sixteen year old who has been incarcerated for nine years for having killed her three step-siblings – a boy and two girls... The reader’s experience of Clare develops through the increasingly entangled observations of George, her probation officer. The relationship between these two characters is so compelling that it takes on many shapes throughout the three works, and indeed in many of Maiden’s poems over the years. Clare and George become the moral compass of the work – as they seek their own form of restitution, move through different locations, and continue to touch base with one another...
All of the books are intertwined, following a series of threads that are developed further with each story, bringing in elements of domesticity, motherhood, and love. Maiden doesn’t flinch at exploring the complexity of violence, war, displacement and grief, or bringing in real life characters... into the narrative. At no point does Maiden overly simplify the issues she explores, whether it’s the implications of love and intimacy, or the morality of war, refugees, or the nature of violence and suffering.
Throughout all three books, there’s a richness to the language that draws on Maiden’s poetic skill and linguistic precision.
The multi-genres novels contain elements of the thriller, mystery, and romance, all of which keep the reading fast paced, though they’re very much theme driven and literary, referencing many external texts including music, other classic fictions (D H Lawrence is particularly important in the third book), and paintings, post-modern repetitions, and self-referentiality...
Taken collectively, the Play With Knives trilogy represents engrossing reading that takes the reader to new places from both a literary and a political/theoretical perspective. The moral terrain that Maiden explores remains as relevant today as they were when the first books were originally written.
Excerpted from the online review, Compulsive Reader: http://www.compulsivereader.com/2017/02/11/a-review-of-the-play-with-knives-trilogy-by-jennifer-maiden/
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Experienced literary reviewer, Jonathan Shaw has written an insightful review of The Metronome. His appreciation is excerpted below.
Jennifer Maiden, The Metronome (ebook, Quemar Press 2016)
Jennifer Maiden’s poetry inhabits the news cycle the way another poet’s might a particular landscape. Kevin Rudd’s pursed lips, George W Bush’s nose, Tanya Plibersek’s smile, Tony Abbott’s hurt look – all have been sharply observed and made meaningful in her poems...
I... enjoy the conversations: what do Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln have to say to Hillary Clinton; what do Jeremy Corbyn and Constance Markiewicz discuss as they stride out on the moors; and who wouldn’t want to eavesdrop on Tanya Plibersek and Jane Austen?...
...the conversational mode draws one in: one reads for the argument (in this book, a recurring subject is economic austerity), the wit, the odd twists of mind and unexpected digressions. Sometimes, as in the adventures of Clare Collins and George Jeffreys, characters from her three Play with Knives novels, one reads for the story...
Like any good conversation, these poems tend to touch, glancingly or attentively, on a wide range of subjects. I found myself reading with my phone near at hand: I watched Vladimir Miller singing Veniamin Basner’s ‘Leningrad Metronome' on YouTube (for the poem ‘Metronome’); I checked to see if Malcolm Turnbull’s middle name really is ‘Bligh’ and William Bligh really was a water-colourist (for ‘Temper’); I satisfied my curiosity about the unnamed critic; I read Wikipedia on Constance Markiewicz (for ‘The gazelle’), Dick Whittington (for ‘‘Turn Again, Whittington’’) and the brumby cull in the Australian Alps (for ‘George Jeffreys 19: George Jeffreys Woke Up in Thredbo’)...
All that is pleasurable... the interplay of texts..., and there’s pleasure in the way the words sit on the page...
Maiden’s use of enjambment: often a line ends with the first word or two of a new phrase – three of the ten lines from ‘Clare and Nauru’ above, for example – or a line break falls after a preposition or between an adjective and the noun it refers to. Something in the poetry plays against the conversational rhythms after all. It’s nothing as orderly as James’s classical model, but it keeps the reader on her/his toes.
...she uses rhyme a lot, though not always obviously. I was shocked to realise, for example, that all but two of the 34 lines of ‘George Jeffreys 19’ rhyme with either ‘so’ or ‘cull’...
Maybe there’s even an iambic tetrameter lurking... Whatever, I enjoy and am challenged by my first, naive read, and then find more on each further read. As I think I’ve said before, I’m a fan.
The Metronome was published by Quemar Press as an ebook (available on the Press’ website for $5) on the night of the US presidential election – quite a feat given that in its final poem, ‘George Jeffreys 20: George Jeffreys Woke up in Washington’, Donald Trump’s ‘soft voice sounded infinitely defeated’ when he told George over the phone that he’d won the election...
It’s a great start to a year’s reading.
Excerpted from https://shawjonathan.com/2017/01/17/jennifer-maidens-metronome/
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Jennifer Maiden’s poetry inhabits the news cycle the way another poet’s might a particular landscape. Kevin Rudd’s pursed lips, George W Bush’s nose, Tanya Plibersek’s smile, Tony Abbott’s hurt look – all have been sharply observed and made meaningful in her poems...
I... enjoy the conversations: what do Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln have to say to Hillary Clinton; what do Jeremy Corbyn and Constance Markiewicz discuss as they stride out on the moors; and who wouldn’t want to eavesdrop on Tanya Plibersek and Jane Austen?...
...the conversational mode draws one in: one reads for the argument (in this book, a recurring subject is economic austerity), the wit, the odd twists of mind and unexpected digressions. Sometimes, as in the adventures of Clare Collins and George Jeffreys, characters from her three Play with Knives novels, one reads for the story...
Like any good conversation, these poems tend to touch, glancingly or attentively, on a wide range of subjects. I found myself reading with my phone near at hand: I watched Vladimir Miller singing Veniamin Basner’s ‘Leningrad Metronome' on YouTube (for the poem ‘Metronome’); I checked to see if Malcolm Turnbull’s middle name really is ‘Bligh’ and William Bligh really was a water-colourist (for ‘Temper’); I satisfied my curiosity about the unnamed critic; I read Wikipedia on Constance Markiewicz (for ‘The gazelle’), Dick Whittington (for ‘‘Turn Again, Whittington’’) and the brumby cull in the Australian Alps (for ‘George Jeffreys 19: George Jeffreys Woke Up in Thredbo’)...
All that is pleasurable... the interplay of texts..., and there’s pleasure in the way the words sit on the page...
Maiden’s use of enjambment: often a line ends with the first word or two of a new phrase – three of the ten lines from ‘Clare and Nauru’ above, for example – or a line break falls after a preposition or between an adjective and the noun it refers to. Something in the poetry plays against the conversational rhythms after all. It’s nothing as orderly as James’s classical model, but it keeps the reader on her/his toes.
...she uses rhyme a lot, though not always obviously. I was shocked to realise, for example, that all but two of the 34 lines of ‘George Jeffreys 19’ rhyme with either ‘so’ or ‘cull’...
Maybe there’s even an iambic tetrameter lurking... Whatever, I enjoy and am challenged by my first, naive read, and then find more on each further read. As I think I’ve said before, I’m a fan.
The Metronome was published by Quemar Press as an ebook (available on the Press’ website for $5) on the night of the US presidential election – quite a feat given that in its final poem, ‘George Jeffreys 20: George Jeffreys Woke up in Washington’, Donald Trump’s ‘soft voice sounded infinitely defeated’ when he told George over the phone that he’d won the election...
It’s a great start to a year’s reading.
Excerpted from https://shawjonathan.com/2017/01/17/jennifer-maidens-metronome/
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