Canvas book reviews: How Poetry Works by Anna Jackson, Send Nudes by Saba Sams, and a conversation with Emma Viskic

Saba Sams. Photo / Supplied

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BOOKS IN REVIEW

Send Nudes
by Saba Sams
(Bloomsbury, $33)

Reviewed by Eleanor Black

To be a young woman in any time and place is to perform a dazzling dance of push-and-pull – to carve an independent path while others aim to lead you elsewhere; to learn to please yourself and not others; to hold firm to your beliefs and values in the face of braying opposition.

But it does seem that right now is a particularly difficult time to come of age as someone who identifies as female. There is ample evidence of this, in life and in literature. Mid-20s British writer Saba Sams presents a ream of complex scenarios for her authentically messy and defiant young women to navigate. The pleasure of her debut collection of stories, Send Nudes, is that the protagonists manage to (mostly) turn these seemingly bleak situations on end and emerge triumphant.

They survive manipulative and ambiguous relationships, casual cruelties, poverty, messed-up social standards, broken families, unwanted pregnancies, bad sex and bad men, facing up to bullies and braggarts with a knowing sneer and one-fingered salute. They are funny and raucous and smart. You want to know them; you would never dare to cross them.

When a beach holiday evaporates due to the pandemic, a young woman creates magic for her sick mum. A pair of trapeze-artist friends take their teen daughters on the road and a young man overestimates his romantic appeal. A butcher develops a closer relationship with her much-older boyfriend's dog than with him. Always, a twist.

Sams writes with seemingly effortless fluidity, building her story from sharp, simple sentences that lock together like Jenga pieces. An encounter at a music festival goes like this: "The man's tent was slightly larger than the one I was sharing with Eliza, though the exact same brand. I hadn't showered in four days. My vagina smelt like prawn cocktail crisps. I left straight after, and bought a hot chocolate in a polystyrene cup."

The world inhabited by Sams' characters is one of grubby flats, dive bars, foster homes and family-friendly holiday parks. Her women drink snakebites and cheap wine and eat to punish themselves – nothing but cheese sauce from a packet for dinner, or salt and vinegar chips crushed up in pottles of yogurt.

They don't have the time or patience for niceties. "The sex hadn't gone as I imagined but it had gone, and that was the main thing," says the protagonist in Tinderloin, which was shortlisted for the White Review short story prize. In The Bread, two friends muse: "'Do you ever worry that nothing you do matters?'... 'Hardly ever, I worry more that everything I do does.'"

This book has made it on to a bunch of "must-read" lists for good reason and Sams offers the close reader a lot to think about. She is definitely a writer on the rise.

Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works
by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, $35)

Reviewed by Bryan Walpert

Neither textbook nor scholarly intervention, Anna Jackson's Actions & Travels is instead more like a guide to a country whose landscapes, vistas and history await discovery for the curious first-time visitor and further discovery for the returnee. She makes for a deeply knowledgeable, warm and enthusiastic guide to the territory.

One of the book's strengths is the diversity of poems across place and time: William Butler Yeats next to Bill Manhire, Catullus beside Janet Charman, John Donne by James K. Baxter. You needn't love all of the 100 poems on offer, but you will certainly find plenty to discover or to read differently. The book includes a set of useful writing prompts for those inspired enough by the journey to want to contribute to the tradition.

Jackson groups some poems by craft, some by style and some by subject matter, including political poetry and "Poetry & the afterlife". Such broad groupings reveal how certain aspects of poetry cut across time and style, taking on local textures—say, how understanding The Red Wheelbarrow by the modernist William Carlos Williams allows for greater appreciation of Jenny Bornholdt's poem, "Photograph.

Sometimes Jackson's brief dives into scholarly distinctions and vocabulary mean potentially challenging close readings, for example of Sappho and Catullus in the interesting chapter "Conversations with the past". At their best and most accessible, her readings elucidate the complexities of the poem. In Hone Tuwhare's poem Hotere, she draws our attention to "the perfectly placed colloquialisms" and the effect of the "rising inflection" of the tone, both strategic decisions on Tuwhare's part. At other times I wished she had aimed the impressive lens of her experience more fully on some of the other poems, like work by Kay Ryan, Elizabeth Bishop, Jericho Brown and Terrance Hayes.

Of course, there also are the inevitable might-have-beens with regard to which poets to include. I would have given more attention in the "Sprawl" chapter to such poets as Alan Shapiro, Mark Doty or David Kirby (and indeed to Jenny Bornholdt). But so what? That's poetry —a field in which there are no answers, only arguments. That, after all, is what makes poetry a living art form, makes it a community rather than a museum, filled with interest and beauty and surprise. This, more or less, is the point of Jackson's useful and approachable book, which generously and successfully characterises poetry as a long, interesting conversation worth entering.

The interesting idiosyncrasies of her choices and structure are in fact part and parcel of Jackson's implicit argument about the relationship between the reader and the poem. She doesn't expect a reader to agree with her choices or her opinions. She says so directly, urging the reader to peruse and consider the poems — there's a web link — before reading any given chapter, thus "forming their own sense of the poems that can be compared with mine".

Jackson's argument for the role of the reader is implicit, too, in the epigraph from the poet Anne Carson: "I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on the page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action."

What I think Jackson wants most is for readers, whatever they decide about a given poem, to be touched by poetry and to engage with it. As the epigraph concludes, "by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference".

Bryan Walpert's novel Entanglement (Mākaro Press) is shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com.

INTERVIEW

Emma Viskic. Photo / Supplied

Silent alarm: Classical musician turned crime queen Emma Viskic talks to Craig Sisterson about isolation and writing underrepresented characters.

The end begins with a text, a frantic three-hour drive and a gunshot by a toilet block near the Resurrection Bay foreshore. With his hearing aids in his pocket, Caleb Zelic couldn't hear the crack of the rifle. But he saw his brother Ant's hands signing "Get out of here, run!"

He saw the passenger window disintegrate. Inches from death.

"Those Who Perish was the natural ending for this series, as it's a homecoming of sorts," says Melbourne author Emma Viskic, as we discuss her award-hoarding tales starring a deaf private investigator. "In many ways the four books have all been about Caleb trying to find his place in the world. In Resurrection Bay, he's isolated and estranged from his family. Because of his upbringing, he's at odds with himself, not comfortable in the deaf or hearing community."

As Caleb evolved, says Viskic, it felt right the final book would be about his family, which includes his pregnant wife Kat, an indigenous artist, and Ant, a drug addict.

A professional clarinettist-turned-crime writer, Viskic always set out to write a shorter series, where her hero grew and changed. She wanted to deep-dive into Caleb's world, while avoiding the cliche of an investigator who "lurches from case to case, book to book, unable to change".

Caleb Zelic was first introduced to readers in Viskic's exquisite 2015 debut, Resurrection Bay, but he'd been living in the would-be author's head for years. So, why would a musician, for whom sound is a vital part of life, want to write about a deaf man solving crimes?

Crime fiction called because Viskic is fascinated by people, and the form "has a unique ability to illuminate and examine human behaviour", she says. Many of her favourite works have a crime element, even if they wouldn't be shelved there in a bookshop: Macbeth, Lolita, Wolf Hall.

The seeds of Caleb's character had been growing since Viskic's childhood.

"Some of the inspiration came from a profoundly deaf girl I went to school with, but a lot of it came from my paternal grandparents, who were Croatian immigrants. Baba and Dida didn't speak English and I didn't speak Croatian. Their isolation and our inability to communicate loomed pretty large in my life, and those themes have been seeping into my writing all my life."

As a professional clarinettist for 20years, Viskic did everything from busking for beer money at St Kilda to accompanying global icons like Jose Carreras and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

"I'd just returned from studying in the Netherlands, so when I was booked to play in an orchestra accompanying a solo soprano, I thought it'd be pretty low key," recalls Viskic. "No one mentioned it was for Dame Kiri. She's been a favourite of mine for years, so to say I was overwhelmed when she walked into rehearsal is putting it mildly."

Switching from a sound-centric life to writing about a character for whom sound is foreign was a jolt. Wanting to authentically convey Caleb's world, Viskic did intensive research. She read memoirs, spoke to many people in the deaf community, completed a lip-reading course, walked around Melbourne with earplugs in, and studied Auslan sign language at TAFE.

"Good writing is about empathy, but it's also about knowledge," she says. "I learnt a lot that didn't directly make it into the novels but it all informed them. Hemingway's iceberg theory really makes sense to me in terms of how much you need to know and how much you need to show."

Viskic, who shares Caleb's Slavic heritage and connections to Aboriginal communities through marriage but not his deafness, says it's nerve-wracking to write outside your own experience.

It should be.

"For writers considering it, I'd say to ask yourself why? If it's for a cheap hook or tick-box diversity, don't do it. If it's a subject you're deeply drawn to and have a connection with, then start working. Make sure you know your facts, examine your own prejudices and assumptions, and be willing to take criticism for the final result."

Having Caleb "cohabiting" in her head for several years had an unexpected impact, says Viskic. "I'm not a very visual person, in fact I have aphantasia, which means I have no mental imagery, but writing Caleb's character has made me far more visually aware. He has to pay attention to body language and expression in order to lip-read. And he has to be acutely aware of his surroundings because he's in a crime novel and someone might be sneaking up behind him."

Writing Those Who Perish during the long Melbourne lockdowns also ramped up the sense of isolation, perhaps too much, admits Viskic. "Let's just say the first draft was more a gothic horror than a Caleb Zelic novel, complete with ravens and creepy men in towers. I had to shift gears on the next draft and learn how to write like Emma Viskic again instead of Emma Bronte."

Those Who Perish, by Emma Viskic (Echo Publishing, $33), is out now.