Review of Sparrow: Poems of a Refugee, by Belinda Broughton

A little bird told me a story,

and though its memory is faulty,

and the poetry of its song was translated through the muddied rivers of memory,

the story was so true that even the lies make it through

the wall of time and, growing up and growing old,

become true enough in the end to make a good story great.

This book in my hand, Sparrow, is to poetry what a novel is to a bar-room tale.

Some poets will lie about the truth,

others will tell the truth about the lies they have told,

or been told,

but this Sparrow tells the story of a refugee child who,

growing up in war and torment

and fleeing like a wild animal to find safety in a foreign land,

found love and truth and healing and a whole life of stories:

Australia is a land populated by refugees, and there is something magical in that fact.

This red and yellow and black and white earth takes us all in and makes us feel like we belong, no matter where we come from. There are poets who will write about magpies as if they have only seen them on TV, there are poets who write about love as if they know only what their own broken hearts have to say on the subject, there are poets who will try to convince us that their monsters must become our monsters, that we must join in their fight or else be declared enemies of freedom, poets who do not believe, or who believe too much...

This Sparrow, this biographer poet who tells the story of her husband's flight and freedom and of the five thousand fights that a man must fight before he can call himself a man, tells something more than truthful, and the language of her poetry is simultaneously perfect and plain. I can hear the magpie songs as I turn the page, I can smell the sweat of horses, I can feel the rising surge of love as children play and fight and swear and grow up in this expansive story of life contained so succinctly between the covers of a little paperback book. This poet does not try to convince, does not wrangle, does not describe the abstractions of experience, but rather, she speaks with the voice of magpies, she dances in the circle of her family, admits the fragility of memory and in doing so has achieved a monument of literature that transcends the details of the story, and fills me with a sense of real knowing, real understanding.

A little bird told me a story

and though its memory is faulty

and though the song may have lost something of its details to the erosion of time,

these poems of a refugee,

these Sparrow footprints, wet upon the stone,

have left a mark that will not evaporate

from my heart.

Review written by: Morgan Taubert.

PS.  Normally in a review, I would include some examples of the poet's work,  but Belinda's book is so magnificent from first page to last that I have struggled to find anything suitable to serve as an example.  So, needing to quote something, I will give you the very last passage of the book, from the poem - Awakening.

The sky opens to the stars.
All of life could be between my thumbs.

The needle and the camel,
crazy people like me slip through.

the dark knot of my heart unravelled.
She bunched it up with her hair.

After discursive dreams, my eyes opened.
Nothing had changed; everything had changed.

I awaken to myself.
It is one of the many ways to die.

*

Belinda's books, can be found through Ginninderra Press, as well as her blog:

www.belindabroughton.wordpress.com

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Review of: Synonym for Sobriety - A book of poetry by Ben Adams

Review of 'Synonym for Sobriety', by Ben Adams

I've heard it said that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection, community, friendship, association, kinship and all the other terms synonymous with a healthy life and mind. So while sobrietas is not always the antonym of ebrietas, it may be said that the two states of being have more in common than one might expect. Omar Khayyam tells me that '...drunk or sober a man lives in doubt, so pass the wine cup...', and whether or not he spoke of spiritual, or alcoholic wine, one cannot live in such a state and still maintain the resolution required of a man to live in the world. So, drunk or sober, Ben Adams book tells us the story of his life.

He is, (I think) by collecting this decade of poetry and sharing it with us, trying to illustrate that sobriety is not the same as renunciation, nor is it abstinence or ascetism. To be a poet, one must live in the world, and thus, all poets are compromised between their ideals and the reality of life and death. So between the strip clubs and the libraries, the empty streets and the empty nights, Ben describes to us the fullness of his connections to both the living and the dead. I think him right to wear his influences openly and to proudly declare both Hemingway and Bukowski as his friends in literature. Cicero and Tacitus taught that in order to learn the craft of oratory, once must seek out those worth emulating, and through the study of their great work, come to find one's own voice. It is in the gaining and the loosing of love that poets comes to know themselves, and Ben's book is a story of a life replete with both, mixing poetry both rhythmic and prosodic. But it is also haunted by the ghosts of uncertainty, so common in our age where truth itself seems just another fake news report.

Through long afternoons

we gulp falernian wine

and send back word from the edge

there is nothing here, nothing left

to defend -

- except an idea, this empire braced

against the invasion of years

and the sky above,

like Rome itself

a canvas of splendid

familiarity hung

above the burning wind.

I think that Ben Adams is keenly aware of the pool of great literature in which his book now swims, and while it is not for me to declare the fate of his work, I do affirm its worth. There is truth in poetry, and Ben soberly gives his account of it, sometimes drawling of the tired striving and failing of everyday life, sometimes insisting that there is beauty in the fractured lives we lead. He's certainly not trying to sugar coat the story, but it is sweet enough in his telling to find value in reading, and re-reading his poems.

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Find Ben's book through www.friendlystreet.org

or on www.facebook.com/bts.adams/