‘Why She Gave Me the Painting’ by Carolyn Abbs

INTRODUCTION

Launch Speech by Dennis Haskell

INTRODUCTION

In my first collection, The Tiny Museums (UWAP, 2017), I included a poem entitled ‘Miss Philipou’s Class’. It is about the teacher who instilled in me the love of poetry, at the age of eleven. The text for that year, Narrative Poetry, I keep on my bookshelf:

I turn the pages          

Miss Philipou’s voice      switches on      like a radio song

            Narrative Poetry      she cries with darting eyes

pushing up her black-ribbed sleeves      jingling silver bangles.

We shop in Goblin Market      skip through streets of Hamelin.

            Listen to a wedding speech.      Marvel

            at the wingspan of an Albatross.      Repeat the O!

                        of the Wraggle Taggle Gypsies O!

            Help build a canoe      for Hiawatha’s sailing.

            …

Miss Philipou’s voice never quite left me. All through the years of raising a family and moving from the south coast of England to Melbourne and then Western Australia, it remained and influenced who I was to become in later life—a poet.

As my children were growing up, I studied for an English degree and an Honours in Poetry. I then went on to a Ph.D.: Virginia Woolf: A Mosaic of Nonverbal Arts (2001). The themes of this work—the close reading of Woolf’s use of multiple art forms in her writing—are present here in Why She Gave Me the Painting. The poems are conspicuously visual, shimmering with colour or emphatically monochrome. They offer the reader a discovery of dance, sculpture, theatre, painting; an experience of the tactile, movement and texture.

The collection is divided into three parts. In Part One, ‘In the Auditorium’, the poems are set in art galleries, airports, railway stations, even a hospital; offering the reader an experience of how it is to be ‘on-stage’ to be a participator in a work of art; to be led through the bodily experience

In Part Two, ‘I Saw Through Glass’, the poems present a look through windows, screens, glass cases. The poems address the horrors of a war long past, a father, a grandfather. Then into the immediacy of the present day: Australia, the beach, a pop-up theatre, while remembering a photo booth. Part Three: ‘House on Sand’ is firmly grounded in Western Australia—a half-built house by the ocean, the bush, animals, birds, a child’s footprint in the sand, the homeless, and concluding with kites in the sea air.

I am still the person who once sat at a desk in Miss Phillipou’s class on a summer afternoon and discovered the enchantment and music that language can conjure. I knew one day that I would write, and have now been writing poetry for almost twenty years. In 2013, I was fortunate to have a year-long mentorship with Lucy Dougan. Lucy was an inspirational and generous mentor. The mentorship led to a collaboration with my sister, Elizabeth McClair Roberts, on a poetry / photography project: ‘Different Hemispheres’ (Axon: Creative Explorations, 2014).

These days, Elizabeth and I speak every week on Zoom. We chat about what we are reading, her photography, my poetry, art exhibitions we might have seen. I write from South Fremantle, near the Indian Ocean, in Western Australia. She lives by the sea in East Sussex, UK, where we grew up together. I am thrilled to have one of her photographs on the cover of this book. It is the sea that connects us with our mutual past.

Carolyn Abbs

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Launch speech for Carolyn Abbs’s Why She Gave Me the Painting by Dennis Haskell AM

The editorial work for WA Poets Publishing shows that poetry in WA is thriving, notable for its quantity, quality and also its range: the work varies considerably; and the series is gaining in prestige as it grows. It was a great pleasure for Lucy Dougan and me to work on Carolyn’s manuscript: the quality of the work was apparent on first reading and we only had to do bits and piece –  punctuation, ensure consistency in the manuscript, suggest corrections here and there…

Those of you who know Carolyn’s first collection, The Tiny Museums, will know that one of the most important people in her life is her sister, and Why She Gave Me the Painting is dedicated “To Lizzie”. Lizzie – Elizabeth McClair Roberts – is a well-known professional photographer, but she’s not the only one in the family with photo-like perceptions. The quietly spoken Carrie has a PhD, on Virginia Woolf and the links in Woolf’s writing to other artforms. Being humans, sight is our dominant sense, and Dr Abbs has a strongly visual, often colourful imagination. The book’s title mentions painting, and evocative verbal painting is everywhere in this collection. These poems might, as in her first book, be tiny museums but the exhibits are very much alive. I should mention that painting is not the only other artform referenced in the collection: dance, theatre, sculpture all get a look-in; Virginia Woolf could only be jealous!

Elizabeth still lives in East Sussex, where Carolyn grew up, and one of her photographs graces the cover of the book. Dark and brooding it is, a bit like the UK economy, but that is only one of the moods conjured up by these evocative poems. Despite living here for more than four decades, Carrie still has a strong sense of her childhood and its landscape, and the time covered in Why She Gave Me the Painting ranges from her grandfather’s period of life, through Twentieth Century wars to the present, in particular present-day Fremantle – its sites and its people. Carolyn is an acute and very humane observer of others, either in memory or in immediate observation. And it’s not only people and their places she observes so precisely – animals, insects, birds also capture her imagination, and she treats them all with great empathy. Carolyn originally had a title related to dance – we talked her out of that! – but it’s worth noting that the poems move with rhythms so appropriate that they appear natural,and help give the voice of the speaker in the poems an undeniable authenticity. This means that the poems just carry [no pun intended] you along and if you reflect at the end of reading a poem you think that what the poem reveals could not be otherwise.

It’s time to illustrate all these claims, firstly with a somewhat random selection of lines and images as tasters:

—– “wavy hair, vague as sea mist” (“Traces of Turquoise”

—– “Birds sing dotted / along the washing line like pegs” (“Two Women”)

—– One of a number of hospital poems: “6am   headlights swish in a haze of silver rain.

—– My body remains, a slow length of silence.” (“The Long Night”)

About her father’s war memories:

—– My father, dying at sixty-nine, chose
—– to watch over the sea…

—– Churning of the waves, flash—
—– Backs, shattered faces, shrapnel
—– Rushing into the bony cave of his skull.   (“February 1988”)

A poem about the “Grandfather I Never Met” has a powerful epigraph from Virginia Woolf:

“The dead are everywhere but nowhere.” The book makes this seem compellingly true.

And now a complete poem:

—– Audition

—– Rattling through a tunnel on the Métro de Paris,
—– I sit between a man reading an art magazine
—– and a petite young woman in black-silver-
—– backed glass reflects our blurred faces. Surrep-

—– titiously. I peruse a page of red-yellow Kandinsky.
—– The woman in black fidgets, bites nails, swipes
—– her phone. Calms. Listens… Oui, merci Madame,
—– she nods, as if acquiescing to a tutor. 

—– Her silver-ringed fingers flicker like baby birds
—– learning flight  ̶  elbows lift, feet step mini skips—
—– eyes closed, she sways in patterns of choreography.
—– Rhythm of the train jostles me behind her eyes—

—– a studio decked with mirrors—barefoot leaps reflect
—– over and over, swirl of red dress flecked yellow,
—– bits of black. Flying alight. She’s fire.
—– At Opéra, she dissolves into the dark.

In the poem art and life are integrated. Nowhere in the book conveys a sense of capital “A” Art: art in Carolyn’s work is as integral a part of life as catching the Metro, and there’s a touch of humour when the Madame observed gets off at the Opéra station and “dissolves”.

Even when ending in dissolution such poems are celebratory, and it’s true that an achieved poem is intrinsically a celebration – but its subjects might not be. Carolyn’s collection is on the whole a celebration of what Louis Armstrong sang is a “wonderful world” but the woman moving off the Metro into dissolution also involves a touch of pathos, and there’s a good deal of this in Carolyn’s work. One of the recurrent images is that of glass – the second section is titled “I Saw Through Glass”. We can only see the past as through glass, but what often accompanies the glass imagery is a sense of its shatterability. The fragility of life – something that might he held back by art – is nicely illustrated by a very sad poem about the past set in Amsterdam:

—– Abandoned Theatre
—– Holocaust Memorial, Amsterdam

—– Each visitor entering     falls silent—  
—– this once luxurious theatre      now       

—– a hollow      without a roof.

—– The air      hangs      chokingly thick   
—– in remembrance—

—– cold granite plaques reach skywards
—– engraved with lists and lists of names—

—– innocent people      assembled here    
—– their dark shapes      huddled together.         

—– I want to leave, but a volunteer insists
—–I go up the modern stairs to the museum.

—– Sepia photos span walls like a terrible merry-go-
—– round      a nightmare      rattle of trains            

—– and then in a glass case, small as a crib      a child’s
—– worn grey clothes      pinned flat      as a dead moth.

The theatre might be abandoned but the tragedy and sorrow it conjures up is powerfully evocative in the present. It’s understandable that “I want to leave” but, especially given the recent burst of anti-Semitism in Australia, the volunteer is right to insist that “I go up the modern stairs to the museum”.

This sounds so grim that I want to alleviate it with a humorous poems that might get Carolyn into trouble because it comes at her husband’s expense. In case you don’t know that Tony is a jazz pianist, she includes one poem that begins:

—– My husband plays jazz piano—
—– raspy notes scratch through the hollow

—– of rooms like dog claws on wood floors
—– in the night—I consider shutting doors.

“Piano”/”hollow”“… “claws”, “floors”/”doors”: the rhymes are lovely!

Lastly, I’d like to evidence the third, and final, section of the book, “House on Sand”. This section presents contemporary Australia, especially the bush and Fremantle. One of the poems that illustrates Carolyn’s range is a strange, cheeky prose poem, “What I Did”:

—– What I Did

—– We were poor. My mother was a widow and wore black lace. I inherited her weediness.
—– To improve my chances, she sliced me down the middle like conjoined twins. The
—– separation was painful but, fortunately, brain cells multiply or I’d never have gained an
—– education. Mum gave half of me to an aunt, the other half clung to her cushion
—– bosom. My aunt was a cheque book. She re-named me Katy and signed me off to
—– boarding school. Her brooch scraped my face in a brief farewell. Soon she switched to
—– internet banking and became remote. Each holiday I scampered back to Mum. She
—– was living in a shoe with too many children. She confused my old name with my new
—– name and didn’t know what to do. Too many names, too many mouths to feed. The
—– cupboard was bare. She despaired. I was put in a post-it bag and returned like online
—– shopping. I should have been grateful to my aunt for her purchase, but I became a brat
—– and demanded a Visa card. Month after month, I made a star appearance as debits on
—– a bank statement. Typeset. Next? Read the third volume.

I’m not sure what’s going on here but the poem is full of spunk. It shows that behind the demure pose of Dr Abbs is a livewire woman with a touch of senior punk.

Why She Gave Me the Painting is a wonder-full and wonderful, wide-ranging, lively collection. It’s why she gave us the poem sand they’re a marvellous gift. I heartily commend it to you and declare Carolyn’s book launched!

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