Letters, Chris Mansell.  Kardoorair Press, P.O. Box 748, Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia.  2009.  72 pp. ISBN: 978-0-908244-78-2.  Price: AUD$20

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Letters is Chris Mansell’s sixth collection of poetry.  The book is divided into two sections: ‘letters from abroad’ and ‘letters from the interior.’

One aspect which may interest readers, who might be unfamiliar with this fine poet’s output, is its aural finesse.  Musicality is a prime concern for Mansell and the lines she crafts are consistently beautiful to the ears.

The ‘look’ of a poem on the page also matters to Mansell and, like most poets; her primary aim is with the connotive association of words.  Of course, readers of Mansell’s previous collections will recall the books’ intellectual and emotional content.  The veins of melancholy, toughness and challenges are once again part of her sublime poeticism.  There’s a lot of longing and loneliness in these poems.  The first-person narrator who inhabits them often seems lost, confused and fatigued.  Several of the poems in the first section of Letters concentrate on travel: Misr, Mt Sinai and Rome.  Let me cite some examples:

 these silent days
 won’t bear the weight of speech
 there is much to do but each Ithaca
 disappears before I have imagined
 it and each journey ends
 before I have begun it

  (“all our Ithacas”)

 I am bewildered
 in the Sinai I walk
 with the prophets and the angels
 history is in a footfall

  (Mt Sinai”)

 sick with gold after
 St Peter’s
 (one faith, you know,
 the world refulgent)
 the Vatican Museum

  (“Santa Maria di Maggiore, Rome”)

The problem isn’t that we live in a meaningless universe.  Our predicament is that we become overwhelmed by life and its choices and worn down by the interpretation of its meanings, as we see in the poem “let loose into the water”:

 but you do not come
 there is an errand, slight,
 which takes your time, you will
 forget, but remember
 when next I see you
 “Ah! Sorry!” you’ll say
 but it will be undone
 washed away by then
 and I’ll be cool and
 learn the lesson again
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
The poems then move on to Australia, celebrate Christmas and the themes take in ‘ordinary’ life: reading, a bird, a cat and cows.  These poems  are followed by the beautiful poem “making the moves”:

I run my hands down the smooth
flanks of the world
in whickers and twitches for a moment
soon it will get away from me
this is how it is first you lose
your secure place in the dark
that nice throbbing hole
and then you lose
your power to move
and then you discover sex
and that’s the end of that
I go no further
moving the moves

The second section, ‘letters from the interior,’ opens with the poem “17 types of movement”:

 1.   the dry movement
                  as sand across
                  contradictory sand
                  even as washed by
                  waves
                  this the dry movement

Using simple language Mansell repeatedly urges us to stop and appreciate everyday changes in movement, from dry, heard, harsh, shiny and many more.  The poem ends:

 17.  the fear movement
                  puts sticks
                  in your throat
                  and keeps 
                  them there

In “rest” she writes on why she would leave her body to science.  Her frankness is caught with high compassion:

 leave
 my body to science
 so a young limbed
 med student can
 feel the obdurate
 length
 of my femur
 so he can run
 his fingers through
 my eye socket
 as if exploring
 a young woman
 for the first time

Mansell is clearly concerned about death and the amount of suffering in the world and deals boldly with a range of modern-day fears.  “twenty vibrations a second” is a contemplative poem full of wise thoughts about death itself: “death is a surprise / party     that you’ve / somehow caught wind of.”  Mansell’s spiritual relationship with the world is never far away.  In “the fear” she gives us the sad facts of fear and what it does to us – “it lives wherever you live / and follows you like the moon.”  In “she told them about the man” we learn about the suicide of a man and the way in which a bereft woman had loved “the arc of his intelligence / the blue of his eyes / the way he walked.”  This is dangerous territory as human failings are contrasted with spirituality and beauty of presence.  But I do like the beginning of “meditations upon dust” when Mansell says, “we love the calming / attentions of our own captors.”  The journey moves on and at the end of the poem, we are told that although we are too lazy to read a poem, yet we will love our captors until we die.

Music is also a feature of this section, as we see in the love poem “it is marvellous,” which to me reads very gently, despite the last line.  The poem is quoted in full:

 oh, it’s marvellous not yet
 waking up beside you
 all the lovely not yet
 perfections of place

 the cool dreaming paradise
 the infinite Eden of your
 eyes not yet a colour
 and the deep incision not yet

 made this music is all so far
 this music this paradise
 this sunlight in the garden
 this unbrokered undelimited thing
 fragile anticipation juicy dream
 any act will step us out
 from the imagined ferns
 into the path of misunderstanding

In “the giants are awake in the moonlight” there are some great images: “the night is broken by alertness scratching its accusatory vowels.” “the web caught in the spider’s feet” and  “we chew the night in our irresolute dreams.”   I found these useful places to stop and gather my thoughts when the language becomes so energized it makes us look again at words, think about syntax and line breaks.  “Actors speak louder than words” is a lengthy prose poem written in a series of sayings:

 to face   the countenance   to put a brave face on   bare faced lie   have a long face
 take it on the chin   on the kisser   to mouthe   a mouth on him  the mouth from
 the south

This is a good example of how the reader can make associations between the phrases that in more ways than one transform the production of meaning in a manner one is tempted to call ‘flow of consciousness’ or ‘free association.’  Yet, the poem also brings equally concrete images of the body, the emotions and the frailties of human relationships that produce our personalities, sewing the connections with the final phrase “actions speak louder    than.”  The patterning has the look-at-me character of a hard-worked classic prose poem:

  behind your back   to your face   big ears   tickets on yourself   look down on   look
  up to   look out for yourself or someone else    be a bit twitchy    throw a leg over
  get the hump   to hump   get a slap in the face   slap in the face with a dead fish

This is followed by the penultimate poem “aves & fishes” in which Mansell sums up the art of finding oneself and expressing one’s feelings in poetry:

I am fishing for the self
the one and true selfish
it’s a language I speak I am
quietly in the pool of the river
and I am fishing
that benign hunt
where the flesh is cold
enough to forget it’s flesh
and where the light spools
around the line
here is halcyon sancta
and the dark corvidae watch
for carrion

“the sentence” is a terse, energetic and subtle poem on the art of writing.  The stanzas comprising one sentence are well-integrated and the linkage they pose is compelling:

I am an impatient would-be Basho
more the herb he’s named for erratically
fruiting and sensitive to cold I don’t go
on the thousand mile journeys
alas not this afternoon and never with
the quietude of Matsuo San but
I will walk the slight declensions
of a sentence breathe its cabled
rocks and dream in the effluvia
of leaf litter

Of course, I’m hooked by Mansell’s poems, which are humorous, melancholy, absurd, joyful.  I certainly found myself being drawn down unfamiliar roads to share some profound experiences.  Mansell is not afraid of the dark corners of human life and she writes with compassion and humour.  She moves easily between the poems using simple yet powerful language.  Brief quotes do not convey the muscular emotion and depth of the language – the vibrancy, the depth of feeling that Mansell builds line by line.  The power of this collection is definitely in a slow accumulation of feeling poem after poem.