‘Suited to Grey’ by Ross Jackson

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Launch Speech

Review

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Ross Jackson refers to ‘grey’ as a ‘soft’ and ‘moderate’ colour, and he knows his poems well. His poetic is that of a calm, perceptive observer of the people, sites and environments in which he finds himself. He is often as far from rhetoric as you can go, a poet of Keats’s negative capability. While supposedly ‘lost in the backdrop’ he watches those who have experienced loss – a man ‘folded-up like a pen knife’, ‘a vacant-eyed woman’ – with great sympathy and an awareness of the gaps between hope and actuality that Samuel Johnson would have admired. However, his is a poetry that urges a mature acceptance of reality, a position that seems arguable through his painterly perception of details and understated intelligence. He is a poetic Edward Hopper, his considerable imagination earthbound and intent on seeing through ‘airy regions of self-belief’ to the wisdom of humility and self-awareness.

Dennis Haskell

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LAUNCH SPEECH   ‘SUITED TO GREY’  by Kevin Gillam

 Ross Jackson is the master of observation, curator of the quick thought and quiet note. “Suited to Grey”, so aptly titled, is an opus of poetic precision and ponder. The poems are deftly crafted, often in the style of a nature documentary instilled with sinewy commentary. As a retired English teacher I’m guessing that he is familiar with a lot of verse and this is most evident in the judicious choice of subject matter. I will highlight four of the key elements in Ross’ writing that allow the poems to lift off the page into ear and mind, these being diction choice, imagery, moments of ponder and social commentary.

Consider the closing stanza in “Time Becoming Destitute” –

       —- Evening is a halting cripple
       —- darkness a stealthy wolf,
       —- ghostly lit ambulant trams
       —- stowed with destitute time
       —- surely beetling toward us
       —- groping through fog to get here

We have “evening is a halting cripple”, the empty “ghostly lit trams” as time “surely beetling towards us/ groping through fog to get here”. Such brilliant word choices which truly evince the vividness of the scene and create a visceral flow. And in “Nocturne” the 3^rd stanza reads –

       —- Twisting lanes, sandy
        —- ant-eaten buildings
        —- in baroque architectural style
        —- a comic, operatic wheatbelt town
        —- drenched in sheep dip

Again, the diction choice paints the scene – “ant-eaten buildings” and closing with “a comic operatic wheatbelt town/ drenched in sheep dip”. Maybe Italina opera composers in the 19C might have neglected Meckering in favour of Florence and Venice. Here the sparseness of the landscape sings through.

Precise and evocative imagery permeates the collection and never overly embroidered or exposed.

For example, these final stanzas from “Strand One” –

       —- Here on this night of bright white moon
       —- three shopping trolleys inside the park
       —- two of them dancing
      —- Dawn          yellow bruised sky
      —- even replete with colours       I still
      —- would not touch it up
      —- Flat fields of grey and spiteful winds
      —- lakeside reeds moody with one another

The brilliance of shopping trolleys dancing and moody lakeside reeds lifts the poem to another plain. And a further quote to illustrate the use of imagery is from “An Old Friend Out Flying Somewhere” –

      —- Going separate ways, leaving only the early twilight
       —- to its grey washing
       —- of courtyard tabletops
       —- one old fool driving home, barely aware
       —- of silver birds racing
       —- along a streaky bacon skyline

The “grey washing tabletops” and “streaky bacon skyline”, not overstated but so picturesque.

With observation cones its mirror speculation, and this aspect is integral to the poems in this collection. Take “Upward Gazing” as an example and this quote from stanzas 5 and 6 –

       —- What might be brooding in back of hotel verandas
       —- when a towel or pair of socks appear
      —- sunning on a wooden ledge
       —- under eaves where only city pigeons meditate?

       —- Wondering
       —- who would rent rats’ nest rooms at top of Escher stairs
      —- accessed by clanking iron cages
      —- occupied by fusty associations
       —- the Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes
       —- one such that comes to mind

The very title “Upward Gazing” is an invitation to join the soiree of thought. But it’s the panoramic gaze coupled with details that creates the 1 + 1 = 3 factor. From the quote the reader hears of “a pair of socks’, “city pigeons” and “Escher stairs” all of which enrich the reading experience.

And of course, every poetic flaneur indulges in social commentary re the fabric of our society and existence. These examples from “On the Silent Road to Christmas” –

       —- The widower flush with open-handed time
       —- ruffles that row of glossy rooster feathers

Then –

       —- travelling via postage stamps
       —- absorbing the world beyond the one he’s in

And –

       —- how is he supposed to feel
       —- each time a din of happy family noise
       —- comes crashing in from next door?

“Suited to Grey” is an eclectic and multi-faceted piece of writing. It invites readers into the eye and mind of the walker, wanderer, wonderer. The writing is deft, fluid and subtle. It allows time for reflection and ponder. So it with great pleasure that I declare “Suited to Grey” duly launched.

          Kevin Gillam

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Review: Suited to Grey by Ross Jackson

(WA Poets Publishing) Reviewed by Will Yeoman

WRITING WA

JUL 16, 2024

Clarice Beckett’s visual essays in tonalist precision and Edward Hopper’s visions of quotidian alienation are useful frames of reference for West Australian poet Ross Jackson’s art of ambivalence and a collection in which, as he writes in his introduction, “you will find soft grey tone poems… aplenty.”

Indeed, you will find poems inspired by the work of both painters here, and others besides, such as Picasso. You will also find a music informed by the mellow melodiousness of, to name but two luminaries of a bygone age, Eliot and Yeats. One hesitates to use the term “late style” simply because its range of meanings is so large as to render it meaningless. But there is a “tattered coat upon a stick” quality that pervades Suited to Grey:

——– “the street is too busy to know
——– the gaunt fellow raking up leaves
——– on Christmas day, a shadow     on its own
——– beneath some sunstruck street trees”
——– The Man with Lots of Time

There is a long tradition of obscurity and indirectness in Chinese and Japanese poetry, of the moon or mountains seen only behind a veil of mist or clouds, or as reflections in water. Similarly, the titles alone of many of Jackson’s poems are portals to cloudy regions where precision of thought and craft somehow still pertain. I’m thinking of Within Cloudy Minds, Ghazal with a Mind of Grey, Nocturne, Dreaming in the Outback and In a Black Sea of Sighs, which begins:

——– “one of Pessoa’s personas
——– overspent on saudade
——– so sad, looking up
——– brooding on the black spaces”

Saudade: that lovely Portuguese word, which has no direct translation into English, but which can often refer to a kind of yearning nostalgia for an indefinable something or someone. So suited to grey.

In his introduction, Jackson distinguishes his work from those collections steeped in personal history. He emphasizes that his poems are rooted in the present and often based on speculation and invention. This approach is reminiscent of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where the focus is on the internal landscape rather than external events.

Which reminds me: there’s a neat though very indirect confluence of that poem, and Yeats’ Three Things in Old Man Washed up on a Beach, “his chest still full of grit/churning up/with each/new breaking wave”.

To say goodbye to Eliot: Jackson explicitly refers to him and his Preludes in the same section’s Time Becoming Destitute:

——– “Darkness moves in
——– how dismal this city seems,
——– Eliot’s line, ‘…grimy scraps
——– of withered leaves’
——– seems apt.”

In Mr Grey, a playful, psychologically astute study of Jackson’s own shadow, lines like “that familiar unfamiliar” and “My doppelganger, perhaps” leap out to embrace Baudelaire’s flânerie and “mon semblable,— mon frère!”

Ross Jackson’s Suited to Grey (why do I keep thinking of men in grey suits?!) unfailingly tells it straight by telling it slant. How right Dennis Haskell is when he writes on the back cover that Jackson is “a poetic Edward Hopper, his considerable imagination earthbound and intent on seeing through ‘airy regions of self-belief’ to the wisdom of humility and self-awareness.”

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