Hexagons

NON OMNIS MORIAR: On Love, Brutality, and Death. A bloodshot review of Philomena van Rijswijk's Bread of the Lost

Purely Phenomenal. Purely Philomena.

... Reading this book institutionalized my eyes. Bemused by van Rijswijk's poems, I imagined a series of photogravures of the corpses, black birds, dying swan, spoiled bread, and wounded wombs against the polaroids of the flowers, lazy mornings, lips, fingertips, the sailor, a mother, and a coffee cup.
The surprisingly dark qualities of van Rijswijk's poetic expression and her brutal take on the theme of suffering and death are not stagnant and breathless. Rather, she is a poet who deconstructs the imagery of death:
that even death has to die;
that death, after all, is not death in itself;
that death cannot hang around the kitchen
or else it will be cooked.
Through a highly texturized composition, van Rijswijk's poetry has no traces of lexical loitering and aesthetic voyeurism. Each poem incarnates a raw-meat vision that is not poised yet focused; a magnified memory that is not tangible yet solid.
Without a doubt, Philomena van Rijswijk is a poet, an artist who has a profound understanding of language. Language as a human being-complete and completing. Language as a woman, a mother who doesn't stop being a mother after giving birth. Language, not merely as a tool or means, but also a fruition, an actuality yet imprisoned by the contrasting realities of life.
The emancipation of language is greatly achieved, if not painstakingly, by the gradual moulting of the penumbra of human experience. And it is every artist's vocation to translate human experience into a transfigured humanity. In experiencing art, when a person forgets the images, words, forms, and sounds (how they breathe, and how they move), one comes closely to that which is divine. In truth, Bread of the Lost reveals the poet's truest self and her arrival to the purest creation and we partake of that one bread.


Geri GedaSee more

...and on the third day...

A BRAVE AND LOVEABLE MIRACLE

 

Returned to that hut by the rust-painted rocks

where, once, I saw the sun set, veiled in her

contrived modesty and blushes, and later,

where I saw the sun rise erect

in his fantastic oriental pride.

O, lovely show off!

 

I saw you lift up from underneath the night,

from underneath the tousled bird-blue bedding

of a crumpled sea…

Such a rising up of the day, it was,

appearing, engorged, from under the gently rippling

raw silk of the sea…

 

The conceited peacock,

standing to attention outside my window,

guardian of the liquid light,

wearing his ludicrous little crown,

craned with admiration at the regal uprising

of the day…

 

The sweet applish leaves of the cider gums,

busy in their soft chatter,

were suddenly hushed and suspended,

alert to his salt-stung breath…

and the rowdy authority of the rooster,

watcher of the long grey hours,

was held at bay by the morning’s inflamed glory-

the miraculous resurrection of the day.

 

And O!  my lovely! what heavenwards delights

ascended with the pulsing incarnation,

the blissful optimism,

of that day!

 

Death Poems (Just a Light)

1. THE DISTURBANCE

Frogs chant,

way out in the night,

like the old lady called Millie

who paces the corridor and cries

“Help me!  help me!”-

a plover disturbed from the tussocks

at midnight.

“Nurse!  nurse!” she wails,

day and night,

her voice reedy and rusted.

She is as fragile as a dogwood skeleton:

dry and brittle, and fine as tannin-stained lace.

 

2. DEMENTIA WING

Once, she almost flew back to her room-

glided on an arabesque of flamenco,

lifted on a warm updraft of memories of Rio Tinto

with her wild boy cousins in hot pursuit;

told how the gang of cousins had daily pushed

her wicker baby carriage around the old headstones,

so that she had learnt to read in a cemetery.

She would coach me to say:

Soy guapa!  Soy linda!

and I went along with it,

just to make her smile her beaky smile.

 

She broke her pelvis, they said, and

during the night, no-one could sleep

for her screams.

I heard it some days-

like the sound of a seagull

high up on a cliff-face

being buffeted by a westerly wind.

 

I would go to her, when I could,

and marvel at the unnatural fragility of her wrist.

I’m so ashamed of myself! she once said.

The day they moved her,

I heard her wailing like a banshee

in the corridor.  They pushed her bed along;

it was covered in a nest of cardigans and scarves

and it looked like a drowned albatross corpse

tangled in flotsam.

 

We found her room- she and I.

I put her to bed

and pulled the vinyl armchair to the window.

You’ll be able to sit here, I told her…

you’ll be able to see that patch of sky

and those two trees,

pointing hopelessly to the crowns

of two peppermint gums in the distance.

 

They told me she fell.

She broke her neck.

She’s sedated, now,

and her hands are trussed

to the sides of the bed.

 

3. THIS IS DEATH

Home again;

the place stinks of dead.

I discover a rat

under my bed.

It is light as paper

and leaves puffs of soft fur and skin

strewn around the floor like bulrush fluff.

The cast has been cut from my arm,

the limb a corpse belonging to someone else,

the muscles wasted, tendons rigid with a kind of dying.

Layers of skin waft through the stale air,

like desiccated snowflakes, defying gravity-

a waterless snowstorm in a dry and airless globe.

If this is death, I tell myself…

then it is as weightless as a dandelion clock;

as painless as a dead bird’s flightbone,

hollow and full of sunlight.

 

4. THREE LITTLE GURUS

I picked up a cicada with one skew wing-

it was not an empty cicada,

but a full one;

something inside it was as dense as a sugar-pea.

Its eyes, I noticed, were brown glass beads,

and behind its transformer-like head

there was a velvet band, lichen green.

Its willow-veined wings

were filled in with isinglass

that crackled like paper when you poked a bit

and rearranged to see whether anything

was breaking out of that small crack at the tip of the tail.

The tan, articulated limbs flexed,

like the furry legs of a guru, in fact,

three little gurus

sitting in each others’ bony laps.

 

One morning soon,

there will only be an empty cicada shell,

crunchy, like a gum leaf;

its legs, splayed twigs.

Meanwhile, we wait.

 

5. IN CASE OF FIRE

Yesterday, Mrs Roberts said goodbye to her husband,

after forty-six years.

“He was my best friend,” she said.

Mrs Roberts had to say goodbye in a makeshift chapel

at one end of the big dining-room;

the chairs were the sticky blue vinyl ones

that scream incontinence;

and there were two big ugly vases of fake flowers

scrounged from the corridor.

A plate of yesterday’s scones were iced

with a jaundiced yellow

and served up for afternoon tea,

and the undertakers greasily eyed the staff

who came to give their condolences,

for what they were worth.

Two of the ladies appeared and sat through the fifteen minutes,

but they didn’t really know whose coffin it was.

 

There were just Mrs Roberts,

and her daughter from England,

the only two touched by any grief.

Having knocked back some instant coffee,

the slitty-eyed priest explained that the two mourners

could follow the coffin as far as the store-room doors.

After that, the undertakers would continue on alone,

across the gravel between a blue shipping container

and some wheelie-bins and builders’ utes.

 

Mrs Roberts’ daughter walked with her,

as far as the double doors.

The undertakers slipped through,

with Mr Roberts draped in the Union Jack.

I watched the backs of the two women

as the double doors closed.

IN CASE OF FIRE, KEEP THESE DOORS CLOSED,

was announced in duplicate,

as the heavy doors met and clicked shut.

 

6. JUST A LIGHT, NOT GOD

Too early for work,

I drive to the esplanade

just to watch the waves.

Part of me thinks this is a waste of time-

not going for a purposeful stride

along the hard, wet edge,

but just sitting in my car for five minutes

with the window down-

watching the water breathe the air.

 

There are no waves.

There is just the faint swell and shrink

of the water’s breathing.

It is even too early for the seagulls.

All there is,

is the bright silver-white resting on the surface;

the silver-white glinting.

 

I let my eyes open to the silver-white memory-

the silver-white shifting god-thing.

No wonder people talk about God as a pure light, I think.

Separate sparks of growing-shrinking light

reach toward me,

like the burning phosphorous spittings from a sparkler.

 

Finally, I turn the key in the ignition to leave for work.

It is not God, I know that.

It is just a light.

I am glad.

 

Untitled

Roza and Me

The Bishop, the Gypsy and the Dancing Bear

In response to Magdalena Ball's meme:

1. What is the working title of your current work-in-progress/next book?
The novel I'm working on is called: The Bishop, the Gypsy and the Dancing Bear...It refers to a little story at the heart of the book,about the last of the wild bears......

2. Where did the idea come from?
The idea...well, I guess it came from a gzillion places.... But way back when I started, I wanted to write about wildernesses inside cities and other places where you wouldn't expect to find them.  I really can't remember the process that made the jump to the idea of the Insiders and the Outsiders, but I have been acutely interested in the story of asylum seekers for more than a decade....

3. What genre does your book fall into?

Reviewers etc. have referred to my novels as Magic Realism, but I'm not so sure.  This novel, anyway, is a bit different, so maybe I could call it Speculative Fiction slash social justice......???? Maybe it won't fit a genre.  It will be about 100,000 words in length.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Interesting question...To me, of course, the characters are already played by themselves!  Because I haven't quite finished,I'm hesitant to try to think of actors who might play their parts.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

This is a book about the universal truth that, when we fence our world to keep the Outsiders out, we are actually fencing ourselves in....

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I will have to try to find an Agency.  I don't know where to start with that, to tell the truth, because with The World as a Clockface, Ann Summers recommended me to Penguin.  They asked for it 3 days after I put the last full stop.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft?

Oh, don't ask! I started writing this novel when my youngest daughter was 11!!!! She is now 22!!!! My marriage broke up and I had to start working full time etc etc since then, so not much time for writing.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I really haven't read anything like it....It's not even a lot like my other books.....Maybe Ursula Le Guinn would get it????????

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Well, it's a book about all kinds of marginalized people...... asylum seekers, the ïnsane", orphans", the poor...........I think that's who inspired it......

10. What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

It is a very complex book, with mythologies, cultures, back stories, unexpected connections....It is very strange....I don't think the reader will have ever read anything like it before.