Messages of Things
by Kevin Pearson is a refreshingly different collection. Regarded as
a ‘pioneer in Australian verse
translation’, Pearson
ably renders humour, love, metaphysics, philosophy, drama and colour in
language sensuous, lusty and terse, into a variety of forms - ghazals,
couplets, variations on Catullus epigrams or triptych
‘monologues’. Alternatively, in five poems he pays
homage
to Spanish poets Luis de Gongora, Francisco de Queuedo, Frederico
Garcia Lorca, Jorges Luis Borges, Cesar Vallego, Juan Ramon Jimenez, or
Spanish-American poets Ruben Damo, and Delmira Augustini by way of
translation or adaption. The influence of such poets imbue his language
and images with a richness and flavour denied much contemporary
english-speaking poetry..
The longest poem, ‘Catullan Variations’, employs
the voice
of a lover speaking and musing aloud. The lover uses the focus of the
pet bird in the hands of the woman he desired to relate his love for
this woman - when the bird is being caressed in her hands, the lover
confesses he would like to be:
Budgie you beguile her time.
She plays with you
against her breast,
you so desire her
teasing way
of give and take with
finger tip
you need to nip and
sharply bite
her there; then she
herself, my
golden one, has some
dousing of her
ardour and solace from
your plays
if I could only do the
same,
have sorrow go and peace
return!
and when, the bird dies, the lover decries Death for inducing his woman
to tears.
The poem further unfolds into seemingly unrelated stanzas concerning
the lover’s talk of passion, jealousy, despair, a plea, the
joy
of desire, of comparison to the final declaration of love. These
stanzas congeal as the lover's reflections and shifting states of
mind.
In the seventh stanza of this fifteen stanza
‘drama’,
Pearson injects unexpected colloquialisms. This enhances the
‘drama’ with the element of surprise and
destabilisation or
variation of the metre, and thus the texture, skilfully heightening the
drama and colour overall.
Further drama is evinced in such work as ‘The Assassin, His
Counsel’, which is an indictment of middle-class society as
portrayed through the shifting series of an assassin’s mind
states. Such work is contrasted with wry humour in ‘A Small
Ode
to Soap’ and ‘Oneliners for a New
Lover’
You're narcotic as the chorus of
the night green frogs at Ubud,
...
Your behaviour is the
underwater inventions of the others
You are modest as a
heatwave and as outrageous as the surf.
‘Oneliners for a New Lover’
In ‘Gamelan Voluntary’, Pearson philosophises on
the nature
of ‘is-ness’ and ‘as-ness’ as
represented by
the differing ‘gongs’ of the gamelan and their
symbolic
significance in the scheme of things:
firm as spidery tungsten coil,
tensile, shining, strong
the impossible singing
of ‘is’ I gong and gong as
‘as’
...
as children skip or
hopscotch in any pause of traffic;
as pelicans over the
Coorong, lifting away from us
replicate in their line,
ideas, traditions of distance,
...
as day is day is day for
long as the day is long
...
Firm as spidery tungsten
coil, I gong and gone my ‘is’
approximate as
an
‘as’
A refreshing well-wrought contemporary book of poetry, well worth
having in your collection for a second and third read.
Here again the biennial
crop from the
poets of Friendly Street, and the quality sustained, grant monies well
invested.
This year we have Rob Johnson’s first book [
Caught on the Hop},
a first from
Kevin Pearson [
Messages
of Things],
Mike Ladd [
The Crack in
the Crib]
and Jeff Guess [
Leaving
Maps],
and Jenny Boult’s third [
The
White
Rose and the Bath], though her first with Friendly
Street...
In Kevin Pearson’s
Messages
of Things
the appearance is rather of essences, epiphanies, and those mostly of
natural things: objects of art: and of the problems of appearances, of
beauty.
In a marvellously sensuous poetry, attuned to those Spanish poets whom
he translates so well, he writes nevertheless with an edge of irony
which removes his poetry from self-indulgence.
His ‘things’ don’t shout their meanings,
it is for the reader to
conspire with them to turn a pomegranate into a paean, a carnation into
certainty.
The book contains a number of translations, from Spanish and Latin. We
recognise their distinct voices, like and unlike the voice of Kevin
Pearson, which is a precise, sober and joyous voice. We will recognise
also in these poems the forms and subjects which please him also.
It is not possible, with a poet of such intensity to find lines, to be
quoted in brief, which give enough of his flavour, playful, sensual,
reflective by turns, a strong and individual voice.
Friendly poems - Messages
of Things
Ash, Winter 1984
K.F. Pearson’s
Messages
of Things (Number 7 in the series) is quite different in
approach [to Mike Ladd’s
The
Crack in the Crib].
Pearson is a poet who can take his personal lessons for granted and
simply allow them to inform upon his current choice of perspective. Of
all the poets reviewed here his is the most distinctive voice - his
technique more original and his sources more complex. His approach to
the everyday miracles of love and pain is illuminated not only by
education and imagination but a conscious use of empathy which gets
beneath the skin. His writing of something more than direct experience
and the intelligence with which he does so entirely side-steps
pretension. It is dangerous for an Australian poet to display evidence
of any kind of love affair with the passionate but Pearson is able to
charter the reefs involved by his careful structuring, judicious
injections of irony and a certain sly humour. For example, in
‘Catullan Variations (II)’ Pearson undercuts his
first
verse evocations of sensuality, beauty and melancholy with humour and
deliberate Ockerisms:
Let all of love go weeping now
and all who know of
beauty
the budgie of my girl is
dead,
the budgie who beguiled
her time
she loved it more than
both her eyes,
the honeyed thing knew
her that wel1...
There are many pleasures
in this book,
exotica of image and subject not least among them. Pearson’s
hard-edged lyricism startles with its accuracy. You see it in a poem
such as ‘A New Pomegranate’
Something now beneath
the burnished antipodal
sun
flexible, gold, lithe
visible means of rapport
with the green-to-yellow
ripening pomegranate in
the dust of the white
window
sill silence gathers
round.
Where the sense of colour and light and the lusciously ripe is
typically underlaid with awareness of subtle connections and incidental
word play. Another side of Pearson’s work is the energy and
intelligence of his associative abilities. The following is from
‘The Assassin, His Own Counsel’,
I am always at the edge.
The crunch is musk to my
ear
my thumping adrenal high
is fluid as Fred Astaire.
Come here
I’ll take you
there
you’ll hear
the bullets tear
across the city square
to where the body slumps
and isn’t
panic sweet
hit music to your ears
now you are its cause
and occasion in the
streets?
Oh you’re
a big
boy now sweet
sweet contamination.
New,
Rewarding Verse - Messages
Of Things
Peter Lugg
The Canberra Times,
30 June
1984
These books [Robert Clark and Jeri Kroll (eds.),
No. 8 Friendly St Poetry Reader,
K.F. Pearson,
Messages
of Things,
Jeri Kroll,
Indian
Movies]
tempt one to believe that poetry publishing in South Australia is
flourishing. Pearson’s
Message
of
Things is one of a suite of five new books launched at the
Adelaide Arts Festival in March...
Some of Kevin Pearson’s poetry appears in the
Friendly St Reader.
His poetry is
cosmopolitan, with a special debt to themes and techniques employed by
South American poetry. Indeed, many of the poems in
Messages of Things
are translations
from Spanish, Latin and Italian. While many Australian poets freely
borrow the forms and themes of recent US poetry, the impact of Spanish
poetry is rare. While influence for its own sake is difficult to
encourage, the study of other poetic lexicons can often broaden the
interests of local writers.
As a result Pearson’s poems are sometimes alien and gaunt,
sometimes
rich and rococo. In ‘Catullan Variations’ he has
wittily transformed
the Roman poet into an Australian idiom. He is fond, too, of the
epigram, although the form appears to become his master, rather than
the reverse. Altogether I feel that there are too many translations in
this book, and not enough Pearson...
Each of these three books has good layout and production.
Weekend Books - Poetry
Judith Rodriguez
The Sydney Morning Herald,
16
June 1984
Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets sets an entrepreneurial
example to
other regional publishers, by launching its books at the biennial
festival.
Numbers 6-10 are of high quality. All, with the exception of Jenny
Boult’s
The
White Rose and the Bath,
are first books.
With some exceptions in the work of Kevin Pearson and Rob Johnson, they
agree in trying for an informal fluency that will carry minutiae of
description, anecdote and explanation, on to a communicative whole. It
is spoken poetry, but there are no raised voices, though Mike Ladd and
Jeff Guess most obviously register earnestness. Several of the books
use graphics - to best effect, Eric Chamber’s photos in
Boult’s book,
and fine pencil drawings by Ronnie Kelly in Guess’s
Leaving Maps.
Kevin Pearson, in
Messages
of Things,
typically has in his field of vision a still life and a reflection of
and upon it. His feeling for poetic and philosophic tradition is
appropriately expressed by his associating translations of Vallejo and
Borges with Kevin Hart’s work in
The
Lines of the Hand. These and other poets are raising the
difficult art of translating poetry to a level where Australian
publishers will bring books of poetry, chosen and Englished by
Australian sensibilities, to us from foreign literatures. Indeed, the
Leros Press in Canberra has invited such manuscripts.
Messages
of Things
Peter Armstrong
South Australian English Teachers Association, 1984
These are four of the five new titles in the Friendly Street Poets
series which were launched during this year’s
Writers’
Week. In its eight years of existence, the Friendly Street Poets group
has grown to be a major force in the publication of new poetry in
Australia.
Of these four books [
The
Crack In The Crib by MikeLadd,
Messages Of Things
by K.F. Pearson,
The
White Rose & The Bath by Jenny Boult and
Caught On The Hop
by Rob Johnson] K.F. Pearson’s
Messages of Things
is probably the most demanding of the reader. In many instances, there
is an indefinable ‘I enjoyed reading it but can’t
really
say what I enjoyed about it.’ Sometimes it’s the
sharpness
of the image,
Have a motionless apple rage
within its skin its hour
and
There’s an orange with
a recalcitrant skin,
the sting of liquid
speargrass in your eye.
Then precisely in the
pain you are alive.
the intensity of the feelings portrayed,
To desire and desire and attain
at the last
is the true Kosciusko of pleasure I reckon
the intellectual, and linguistic challenge,
Firm as spidery tungsten coil,
tensile, shining, strong,
the impossible singing
of ‘is’ I gong and gong as ‘as’.
or simply the pleasure of recognizing and perhaps envying the skill
with which these poems are wrought.
I see a dual value in these books. As collections of contemporary
poetry, and contemporary Australian poetry in particular, they are
worthwhile and interesting additions to anyone’s book
collection.
Each book shows a high degree of craftmanship and imaginative skill
with words. The poems reflect the writers, of course, and they reflect
the society within which those writers are working. As a teacher, I
have found contemporary collections such as these invaluable when
placed at the heart of any serious study of Australian literature or
society. If I were currently teaching Matriculation English, I would
certainly introduce these books to my students as a possible area for
extension work.