In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.

Justin Clemens

A Foul Wind traces its lineage back to a hermetic Occitan troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, whose provocative poem ‘Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx’ reads in part (the translation is unattributed), ‘Cos the trumpet’s crude and hairy / And the swamp it hides is dark’. This poem, Giorgio Agamben suggests in The End of the Poem (1999), ‘transforms a sexual prank into a poetic query’, with a trope that seems to doubly signify the anus and a break with metrical norms. Dante referred to Daniel as il miglior fabbro, the better maker. Clemens’s genre-blending fluency is likewise highly artful, formidably energetic, and incessantly coded. Some readers will relish digging up the source codes and spotting the compulsive transformations (‘Hombre Wail, / Sea Moan’s brother’, ‘Punk Fraud’, ‘Lacky’, ‘Thus Spuke Zerothruster’). Others will enjoy the Beckettian nihilist exuberance and its self-reflexive, rollicking disorder and muck:

i put me trumpet to me lips and blow

much like roland at roncevalles

but this is not navarre & there’s no Charlemagne

to send belated aid: there’s only champagne

& abominations breeding like the cane toads of Outremer

flowering to deliquescent pustules in fading night

                (‘the song of null land’)

 

Do not endure the enteritis of elocutionary ordure

a voice brayed suddenly through the half-light of the hall.

                (‘Busting stile to prolong the mechanical’s existentially

                intervallic void’)

According to its author, Who Cares? offers ‘an up-close, humane and grounded ethnographic account of life on welfare’. Eve Vincent foregrounds the perspectives of people who are subjected to ‘an endlessly reforming welfare system’. Vincent spent substantial time in the field, building relationships with her subjects, and while the history of welfare in Australia is neatly sketched and the social and political theories underpinning the study are worthy of interest, the voices of her subjects – those who live in poverty while being subjected to strict (and sometimes nonsensical) conditions – are the book’s most vital and captivating features.

The publication of Who Cares? coincides with testimonies given to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which have further demonstrated that the harms inflicted by the unlawful debt recovery scheme were a product of malicious pigheadedness on the part of the federal ministers and high-ranking public servants who oversaw it. The revelations are entirely consistent with Vincent’s analysis of how welfare is administered in Australia. Vincent – Chair of Anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences - notes that social security became ‘increasingly conditional and punitive’ in the 1990s, and that the trend has persisted in this century. To be unemployed is to ‘subsist in crushing poverty, especially in major Australian cities where housing costs are steep’, but pleas to increase rates and expand access to essential resources are continually rejected.

Who Cares? focuses on people who are ‘affected by two significant recent welfare measures: the cashless debit card and a pre-employment program called ParentsNext’. In both instances, welfare assistance ‘comes with complex conditions attached, and there are financial sanctions associated with non-adherence, or alleged non-adherence’. The cashless debit card trials were introduced in Ceduna in March 2016, and were abolished by the Labor government last year. The card ‘quarantined 80 per cent of all income support payments’ and initially targeted First Nations people disproportionately. The aim was to prevent the purchase of alcohol and drugs, to limit spending on gambling and pornography, and to thereby reduce violence and other destructive behaviours. However, its impact could not be measured because necessary data was not captured before the trial. The cashless debit card was a shoddy social experiment run by people who failed to do the basics.

In 1943, of the 101 science graduates of the University of Sydney, 55.4 per cent were women. That same year at the University of Melbourne the proportion was 46.2 per cent, and by 1945 women made up 37.4 per cent of all science graduates across Australia. Given contemporary anxieties about women’s involvement in science, these statistics appear unbelievable. Yet, as Jane Carey explores in Taking to the Field, between the 1880s and the 1950s women were not only completing science degrees in notable numbers but, even outside the unusual war years, were contributing valuably to Australian science through research, teaching, and social reform.

Taking to the Field aims to ‘name’ and ‘reclaim’ these women. Across six chapters, Australia’s little-known women of science are placed into their respective arenas: as amateur natural scientists in the bush; social reformers gracing community halls and lecture theatres; and as academic women in Australia’s universities. These women, Carey contends, were ‘those who escaped the barriers that restricted other women so completely’. They were women whose social and financial mobility, family connections, and education ‘expanded their horizons’. Carey maintains that these influences – i.e. those that have supported women’s participation in science – demonstrate that there was ‘remarkably little resistance’ to their inclusion, despite our tendency to think otherwise.

This is evident in women’s involvement in the acquisition and dissemination of scientific knowledge prior to science’s professionalisation. Carey uses various colonial women, including writer and keen botanist Louisa Atkinson and amateur geologist and (later) anthropologist Georgina King, to demonstrate that gathering scientific knowledge of the Empire’s far-flung territories was considered a worthy pursuit for financially and socially mobile women in the mid-nineteenth century. Women’s early contributions to science as amateur naturalists aided colonisation by both ‘uncovering’ nature’s ‘secrets and treasures’ and assisting in the ‘quest for national identity’. This was especially important for a nation finding its feet.

Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a thriller that, for much of its length, privileges reflection over action. Thus, when aspiring journalist Tony Gallo makes it back to his car after multiple threats to his life, does he speed away from his potential assassins in search of safety? He does not. Instead, he has a good long ponder:

He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more – a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life – ‘real life’, Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.

The prolixity, undergraduate social analysis, and choice of exposition over action are emblematic.

Birnam Wood is set around the fictional Korowai National Park on New Zealand’s South Island. A neighbouring property owned by Sir Owen and Lady Darvish is being sold to American billionaire Robert Lemoine, ostensibly so that he can build an apocalypse-proof bunker. His true purpose is the illegal mining of rare earth minerals. The property also appeals to Birnam Wood, a collective of guerrilla gardeners, as a place to grow produce. The year is 2017, immediately before the election of Jacinda Ardern.