Vandemonian E-Book

Cliff Forshaw

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 52

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Vandemonian is a detailed, impassioned poetic history of Van Dieman's land, Tasmania. Poems in a variety of voices lay out the island's early story, exploring the truths of colonisation. Forshaw blends historical fact, imagined events and contemporary reflection with religion, geography and the great unknown to produce a portrait of discovery, disenfranchisement and extinction. "An imagination like no other, transforming the world you thought you knew" Jon Stallworthy "These are poems captained by a large intelligence and abundant lexical vigour, poems of voyage, exertion and discovery." Carol Rumens on Wake Cliff Forshaw now teaches at Hull University. A former winner of the Welsh Academi John Tripp Award, and Blue Nose Poet of the Year, his pamphlet Wake was joint-winner of the Flarestack Pamphlet Competition in 2009. His latest chapbook, Tiger (Happenstance, 2011), about the Tasmanian Tiger, came out of his term as International Writer-in-Residence at Hobart. This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon for here.

Leseprobe

VANDEMONIAN

Previous poetry collections by Cliff Forshaw include:Wake(Flarestack Poets, 2009)

Trans(The Collective Press, Wales, 2005)Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk Copyright © Cliff Forshaw 2013

The author asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2013 Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Book Group,

Bodmin and King’s Lynn 978 1904614 60 9 (pbk)

978 1904614 72 2 (hbk)

978 1908376 25 1 (ebook)Acknowledgements

Some of these poems first appeared in the following publications:The Common(USA);Famous Reporter(Australia);Light on Don Bank: Fifteen Years of Live Poetseds. Danny Gardner and Sue Hicks (Sydney: Live Poets’ Press, 2006);Mood Lightninged. Ten Ch’inÛ(Sydney: Imaginal Press, 2004);Poetry Wales;Sketches, Dispatches, Hull Tales and Ballads(Kingston Press, 2012);Tales of the Fox, CD (Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds, 2006). An earlier version of the sequence ‘Tiger’ appeared as a chapbook (HappenStancce, 2011). The sequenceA Ned Kelly Hymnalappeared as a chapbook (A Paper Special Edition / Cherry on the Top Press, 2008). The Ned Kelly, Trucanini and William Lanne poems appeared as illustrated sequences on the web journalEnter Text 7.2‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs’ (Brunel University, 2007); ‘Loop’ appeared as a Carol Rumens Poem of the Week onThe Guardianwebsite.

The author would like to thank Joe Bugden and the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, Hobart, for their hospitality during his very fruitful period as International Writer in Residence. He owes many of these poems to their Island of Resdiencies scheme. He would also like to thank Les Wicks, a great host on the mainland.

Cover image:

Detail from ‘The Conciliation’ (1840) by Benjamin Duttereau by kind permission of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

UK Editor: John Clarke

for Mary

VANDEMONIAN

Cliff Forshaw

2013

Contents

VANDEMONIAN

Landfall in Abel’s Garden

Lat. 43º

The Man

Black Line

The Dog Line

Dumb Cells

Bird

Suddenly One Sunday

Trucanini

The Ballad of William Lanne

Funeral Rites

REINCARNATED LIGHT

Tiger

Loop

Barcode

Old Hairy

Quirk

Star

Roadkill

In Inverted Commas

Possum

The Bottom Line

Thylacinus Cynocephalus

Shot

Devil

Night Road

Blind Date

Devil Sanctuary

Epitaph

Grunts

Fox

A NED KELLY HYMNAL

Ned Kelly’s Eyes

i. Image

ii. Poster Boy

iii. P.R.

iv. Whites

v. Music Hall

A Ned Kelly Hymnal

Alternative Ending

The Shoal Bay Death Spirit Dreaming

Notes

Biographical Note

VANDEMONIAN

Landfall in Abel’s Garden

… and the Dreaming dreamed itself an island

in the shape of the human heart:

an unmoored rock, but fertile,

drifting way off from mainland

while wind and rain dissolved its shores.

And mists hung about its beaches,

caught themselves in trees, straggled

branches, blurring upland reaches.

Elsewhere shrugged itself to driftwood,

fetched up, half-worked, sea-wrack.

And this Dreaming dreamed itselfTrowenna;

seems it dreamed and stranded

clumps of its people on this island:

few in shy groups tending

small fires on its fringes,

slowly raising middens

of shellfish from the sea.*

From Batavia, Antony Van Diemen,

of theDutch East India Co,

summoned skippers, two skeely seamen,

unfurled the map of white, said “Go!”

Down there was Unknown, lacking features:

Terra Australis Incognita

– who knew what riches, what savage creatures…?

Happens Abel Tasman made first landfall,

– a lonely flag on a spit of sand –

baptised this placeVan Diemen’s Land.

And when it came to start again,

forget the past,that convict stain,

(those Vandemonianmarks of Cain),

it seemed appropriate, somehow right

to take Abel’s as its given name:

O Tasmania, my Refoundland.

[Rebaptised, perhaps too soon;

though lucky landfall had not fallen

to Van Dieman’s other skipper,

who went by the handle of the mouthful,

Ide Tjerscxzoon.]

*

Others came to tame this land

and turned it to a cage:

with bars of sea and sand,

and walls of mountain range.

[The old maps on the wall

mark Devon, Dorset, Kent:

named less for home than regiments.]

And the wildlife is renamed

Hyena, Tiger, Devil.

Oh, we will make a garden

of this savage plot.

Blue gums, silver wattle, cycads;

pademelons hopping across wet tracks.

Oh, we will name new worlds

on the template of the old.

Have gardens of lily, rose,

forests of myrtle, oak.*

Now the snake in every garden snores,

it’s the little lamb which can’t lie down…

Bountiful, bountiful.

The Lamb has placed a bounty

on every Tiger’s head;

many happy returns

to the smooth hunter who

gets to sell its skin

for waistcoats, gloves.

The Lord is our Shepherd

and we remain His sheep.

[“The Superintendent of the Hampshire and Surrey Hills Establishments is authorised to give the following rewards for the destruction of noxious animals in those districts. For every Male Hyena 5/-. For every Female with or without young 7/-. Half the above prices for Male and Female devils and Wild Dogs. When 20 hyenas have been destroyed the reward for the next 20 will be increased to 6/- and 8/- respectively and afterward an additional 1/- per head will be made after every seven killed until the reward makes 10/- for every male and 12/- for every female.” Edward Curr, Chief Resident, Van Dieman’s Land Company, 1830.]

Lat. 43º

On an island off an island,

land hangs from land

by a rope of sand:

this epitome of peninsula,

the penal colony’s

penal colony’s

penal colony.

[The colony’s sad tale:

this is where it all hangs out,

daggy as shitballed sheep.]

Here evenTerra Nullius

tails off intoNowhere.

And to say, of course, it’snullius

is to say that they’re No-One:

shy figures, wallflowers,

shadows of unhandy men

immured in the Garden of Diemen.

Nothing between here and the Southern Pole.

Nothing to stop waves from far west

as Cape Town get up some speed,