Editorial
A few days ago, I watched a short film on YouTube from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia called ‘Everyday Things Australians Did in the 60s that are Gone Forever’. As I had my childhood in the 60s, I watched it keenly and nostalgically. Most of the things that have disappeared are those that acted as the glue and cement for community. Everyone knew everyone in their street mainly because you walked everywhere or took the local bus. You knew all the people’s names and even the names of their dogs and cats. You walked to school with friends or freely roamed the neighbourhood on weekends and you gained intimate knowledge of places simply not possible from a car seat. The corner shop was integral and was often the hub for pleasantries or gossip, for meeting old and new friends. You borrowed from your neighbours and they from you. Families had one television and watched it together. Many things that made day-to-day life more intimate, hospitable, friendlier, helpful, modest, and down-to-earth have been eroded, replaced by large-scale urbanised techno spheres and sites that pour noise and product into areas of our lives that really need to be free, calm, and more spacious.
Readers of The Marrow and other journals, lovers of poetry, all know that one of poetry’s most significant benefits and gifts is community. It has aways been a means for communicating stories, beliefs, customs and values, reminding us we are connected in our joys and sufferings and by the fellowship of human feeling. The English poet Ruth Padel has said, ‘everyone has a poetry-shaped hole in them,’ a need for empathetic engagement, a need for that ‘momentary stay against confusion’ (Robert Frost), a need for what will bring us into connection with our inner lives.
In this sixth issue of The Marrow, my first as co-editor, I see the journal as a neighbourhood, a place where you can meet poets you know and those you don’t, a place where you can hear about what is going on in people’s lives—be it loss, the messy interactions of family, the vulnerabilities of illness, the epiphanic, transforming moments and those realisations that have magic or enigma at their core. Consider Cáit O’Neill McCullagh’s ‘I Dream of You Matt Damon (in the Radiotherapy Suite)’ in which imagination becomes a tool for healing and connection, or Victoria Spires’ ‘Teenage Boys’ which explores masculine vulnerability tenderly and with loving allusions to one of our best known literary allegories.
I believe Issue Six provides a space where we can revisit the deep human questions. Patrick Deeley in ‘Autopsy’ powerfully juxtaposes the physical materiality with poetic and metaphorical representations of the human heart. Blood features strongly in this issue. Blood as a metaphor for control, murder, damage, cruelty as in Victor Okeychukwu Osemeka’s ‘Theory of Countries’ whose title pushes the reader into a wider and more disturbing interpretation of the spilling of blood. Monica De Bhailís’ ‘Blood Ritual’ overturns familiar notions and expectations of a wedding when the speaker becomes a ‘bleeding bride’ after having (at first unknowingly) been wounded while cutting the wedding cake. The poem is both humorous and disarming. Blood is insinuated in the killing of the hens in Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s ‘Dominion’, a more ambivalent yet no less distressing shedding of blood. The poem’s details of nurture and care take on a chilling irony by the end.
Poetry attempts to heal the sense of distance and separation we can sometimes experience, that sense that the world is covered over by shallow appearances, that there is something deeper going on underneath. Damen O’Brien’s ‘Gloves’ is a powerful example of how poetry can open up spaces of interconnection and correspondence. It begins by describing a woman’s public display of uncontrollable weeping in a Tokyo street then moves to speak about the broader Japanese cultural concept of ‘Kintsugi’, the fixing of damaged objects making them more precious than they were previously. Wait until you get to the final stanza to see how these threads are charmingly pulled together.
There is nothing worse than reading a journal or anthology with a homogeneity of styles. You’ll find in Issue Six that the poets use form, voice, tradition, influence, and innovation in interesting and surprising ways. Each poet has come to terms successfully with the inherent problems presented by their subject matter, they have committed to the transfiguring power of the imagination, wrangling words with craft, dedication and skill. As usual, there are poets from different countries and cultures in this issue, but each poem testifies that it is poetry that best provides fellowship, that it embraces us and makes us feel part of something significantly larger.
Judith Beveridge, co-editor
