David Grubbs
Duke University Press ($23.95)

by Will Wlizlo

In case you missed the headline, yet another music streaming service was launched this spring. Called Tidal, it differentiates itself from similar platforms like Spotify and Pandora Internet Radio by the quality of the recordings and exclusive access to new work from musicians. Rap mogul Jay Z, French discobots Daft Punk, and Madonna are just a few of Tidal’s many high profile backers. In an unspoken way, Tidal bridges two times: the heady nights of the hi-fi analog era and the everything-on-demand fire sale of the digital morning. It underscores how the way we listen to music has changed in a half-century—and that now, both ways are the only way we want it.

The tension between the ever-righteous vinyl shop and the ever-changing online marketplace makes David Grubbs’s recent Records Ruin the Landscape such a timely and interesting work of cultural history and analysis. Specifically examining the disruptive legacy of 1960s experimental musicians and classical composers like John Cage, Grubbs takes a long look at changes in how music has been conceived, written, performed, and recorded in light of the passage of time and development of new technologies related to the listening experience. “Given emerging media and related shifts in listening practices and access to documentation,” writes Grubbs,

the ongoing conversation about experimental music will continue to focus on the mediation of recorded sound and its distribution, whether in material or digital culture. These histories will remain, like landscape, successions of perspectives—and, in all likelihood, perspectives mediated through forms unfamiliar to contemporary practice.

Echoing Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message, Grubbs makes a compelling case that the ways we listen to our favorite Jay Z album, a Cagean prepared piano sonata, or some other genre that hasn’t been dreamed up yet has an incredible impact on how we evaluate, remember, and present those sounds to future generations of musicheads.

Lucky for living musicheads, access to recorded sound has been thoroughly democratized, and we now live with the opportunity for near-infinite media consumption. The progression from LP to cheaply reproducible compact disc opened the music listening public to a wide array of until-then inaccessible archival recordings. The advent of the MP3 and eventually online streaming services has widened that access further. Anyone with a library card and a basic understanding of Google has near-instant access to 6,000 years of the most esoteric human cultural production. As of this writing, more than thirty million songs are available to listen to for free on Spotify, with 20,000 more tracks added every single day.

Contrast this brave new world with the glory days of avant-garde music. Most of that scene’s participants—whether as artist or audience—lived in certain neighborhoods of New York City, Berlin, or London. It was an exclusive clique with an even more exclusive vocabulary. Performances were frequent but held in underground venues. Recordings of this music were scarce and comparably expensive. And listeners’ ears hadn’t yet adjusted to the wild improvisation of free jazz, rampant genre coupling, or the palette of sounds that were forcing their way into the traditional understanding of “music.”

Enter the ringleader of the movement, John Cage. He was one of modern music’s most divisive innovators, an eccentric mushroom forager, and outspoken hater of records. In fact, the title of Grubbs’ book is taken from a conversation in which he likened a recording of music to a postcard: pretty and sentimental, but a terribly inaccurate experience of the landscape pictured. “Repetition has always been experimental musicians’ most fundamental objection to recordings:” writes Grubbs of this Cagean tension; “they are not true to the nature of performance because you can listen again and again.” If a postcard is a frame to look at a landscape repeatedly, think of the idyllic sunset behind the Italian mountain as the light that obscures the old silver mine where local police stamped out a bloody labor strike. You only see the perfect, untrue sunset.

Cage’s anxiety hinges on two competing ideas about the experience of music (especially the experimental variety). First, that a composition or improvisational arrangement will by nature never be played the same way twice. Thus, it should be recorded as often as possible to tease out the various manifestations that loose instructions can generate. The second and competing notion is that because the composition encourages no fixed representation, there shouldn’t be a fixed representation. No recording, no “postcard.” Ever. Instead, the compositions are meant only to be experienced live—and maybe not for the benefit of the listener.

A perfect example of this tension might be found in the work of La Monte Young, an admirer of Cage. Composition 1960 #10 (To Bob Morris), for instance, eschews the regular notation one expects from a composition and instead instructs the player of the piece to “Draw a straight line / and follow it.” Or consider another, Piano Piece for David Tudor #1:

Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to. (An Anthology of Chance Operations, La Monte Young, published by L. Young & J. MacLow, 1963, Bronx, NY, p. 117)

How exactly does one draw a straight line with a viola? And what is the sound of a hungry piano? With such loose guidelines, an archive of various interpretations would be both fascinating and amusing to sift through. Their inherent elements of improvisation and performance art encourage endless possibility and creativity. Yet the intensity, novelty, and sheer thrill of audience immersion and passive participation in such improvisation are lost in a stray MP3 or grainy YouTube clip.

Additionally, by recording music, more than just the experiential thrill of its original performance deteriorates over time. Context gets fuzzy too. An easy mistake with increasing access to historic music is to forget how obscure those recordings and information about them were in the past. Grubbs provides a perfect example in a little-known punk album by Henry Flynt and the Insurrectionists’ called I Don’t Wanna. (Flynt is best remembered, if remembered at all, for genre-bending experiments such as fusing Indian classical music with Deep South hillbilly fiddle.) The album has the napalm-hot vitriol of punk with lyrics deriding foreign policy, the Draft, and a national shift toward conservative groupthink. It seems like a perfect cultural artifact of the Vietnam era, and it is. But the only problem is that it wasn’t made public until 2004. “A listener can easily forget that this music went unheard for decades in spite of its status as a bracing artifact of the year 1966,” writes Grubbs. “This disorienting listening experience—what do you mean that people weren’t talking about this album in 1966?—points to anachronisms that often accompany the reception of archival releases.”

Anachronisms like the one described above are increasingly unavoidable, as new and old fans now find these works most readily via online archives and streaming platforms. Repositories like UbuWeb and the Database of Recorded American Music fill in the gaps more popular services miss. The boons and challenges of the information age apply to listeners too, especially its effortless ability to overwhelm. After sorting through hundreds of hours of archival music, for pleasure and research on this book, Grubbs writes (with a more than a hint of nostalgia), “There’s something quaintly reassuring and reorienting and of a human scale about touching bottom, about experiencing an archive—be it that of an individual composer or musician or of an electronic-music studio or radio show—in the fullness of its contours. . . . don’t expect this moment to come again.” While access to music widens, it becomes more challenging to connect individual recordings to a narrative chronology or individual tones from sonic innovation. Archives, despite advances that enable the storage of more information, are losing some of their usefulness.

Grubbs draws on Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of the online archive UbuWeb, for a number of insights, including these choice words about radical access to digital media: “Democracy is fine for YouTube, but it’s generally a recipe for disaster when it comes to art.” Grubbs also quotes visual artist Jasper Johns, who said, “The best criticism of a painting is to put another painting next to it.” These two quips presented side by side show the challenges and opportunity of reconsidering the work of fifty years ago with the tools of the present.

Records Ruin the Landscape is level throughout. Grubbs’ concerns of oversaturation are balanced against optimism for the omnivorous ears of new listeners. But his careful consideration of and deep research into the subject matter is full of implications, not just for experimental music geeks, but also for the genre’s practitioners, academics, and the art intelligentsia. The current music listening environment is increasingly like a tourist shop beneath an Italian mountain. Inside, there are thousands of postcards to consider, and outside, the sun is beautifully setting. Where do we look?

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Joseph Harms
CreateSpace ($13.99)

by Jane Franklin

There is much to admire in this self-published Midwestern horror gothic—it contains amazing landscapes; the writing moves beautifully between the realistic, the satiric, and the lyric; and the whole thing operates as a denunciation of patriarchal religion and patriarchal sexuality. It also has a beautiful and well-designed cover (still too rare in self-published works). But Baal is both strangely sexist in its treatment of female characters and gleeful about its use of disabled and non-standard bodies as symbols of depravity and evil. It is a fascinating and accomplished book, but a flawed one.

Baal reworks the familiar story of two youths on the cusp of adolescence who discover that while Satanic evil is real, human evil is even worse. Cassius and Max live in an anonymous Michigan town, a place that brings together all the banal American evils: industrial decline and poverty, covert and overt racism and homophobia, religious hypocrisy and domestic violence. In the forests and rye fields beyond the town, they encounter monstrous beings; in the town itself they commit greater and greater acts of violence to fight back against the religious and patriarchal order that crushes them. In the end, the two worlds are shown to be the same.

Patriarchal violence and patriarchal sexuality are the substrate of the book. All fathers are violent and those fathers who are not sexually abusive seem, like Cassius’s drunken stepfather, continually to hint at this possibility. The bad father who hits you is part of the great chain of fathers, linked to the spiritual leader who conceals and justifies social violence and to God the Father who is also Satan. In Baal, there is no outside to this father system, only war against it from within, and all fathers are the Father of Lies.

To create this atmosphere Harms gives Baal its own language, rapid, dense and baroque—a language of darkness briefly and brightly lit, of the edges between nature and the city. Front-heavy and full of run-together words, the sentences have odd rhythms. They are difficult at first reading, then sharp and vivid, as when Cassius reflects on God:

Us untouchables born from the yawning mouth of a tree dead a thousand years in the center of a wilderness yet imagined who crawl from the dirt to return to the dirt and in our allotted time, make of telephonepoles corpseornamented alters to the real God who blesses every war waged by one alone and blesses none made by many. But Cassius could not pretend more than an instant that such a God existed.

Harms well describes the particularity of the waste places of the world, spaces we know intimately when we’re children—the territory where the suburb fades away into woods, a certain rotted tree marking a boundary unvisited by adults, the way it feels to walk through the semi-abandoned empty farmland on the edge of town. His landscapes are beautiful and nostalgic even when menacing, full of the gold of the rye fields and the drift of leaves. “Beyond the dark alleys between homes,” writes Harms, “the sussurant corn by lapidary moon cut and metalized looked like the foamy wake of a wave about to break.” But in these waste landscapes anything can happen. Nature isn’t a refuge.

This is the world as Bad Place, ruled by a Bad God. Cassius encounters a variety of believers, each attempting to put an acceptable face on the world. All make their cases; none convince. There are the trivially self-serving and ugly homilies at the church his mother forces him to attend, of course, but also powerful consolatory discourses like this from the African American security guard working a grotesque church youth event:

"Let me tell you something, kid . . . There is no white god. White people can’t believe in God ‘cause they think he’s white. But there is a black God. Giant and mighty. And he snuff you out you so much as bad mouth him in an empty room . . .
. . . 'Cause he know about pain and torture, son. He know about murder and rape. He know about stealing for food and killing for food. He know about being an outcast. 'Cause he was born an outcast . . . Black God sees us trespassing with blood and knives and guns and he weeps and begs us, son, begs us to come to him for forgiveness because he knows he’d have done the same thing in our shoes."

But all these discourses are inadequate to the sheer material evil of the world that Cassius encounters. Evil returns, generation after generation, seemingly unstoppable, steadily worsening: “Since the great fires what had happened here and there and mostly during wartimes happened everywhere in the city at all times.” Cassius and Max go to war against the Bad God, to fight what can’t be fought, to kill what can’t be killed.

For most of the book, Cassius is a compellingly written character. Sometimes he appears as a realistically portrayed bright, angry, frightened teenager, sometimes a prophetic voice, sometimes an outlet for the author’s own discomfiting comedy. He would be a stronger character if he weren’t right all the time, though, or if he were purely an allegorical figure and Baal an inverse Pilgrim’s Progress. Again and again, other characters are self-deluding and hypocritical, and Cassius calls them out. He is always right, always better, always heroic even when weak and in despair—and it starts to make the deck seem stacked in his favor.

We’re meant to see Cassius as the book’s moral center, but his actions are driven by the same logic as the actions of the fathers he fights—his morality is based around homosocial love for the males with whom he commits violence; his own violence is justified by threats of violence to women; he identifies himself with a fantasy of female experience while finding real women only unloveable hypocrites and naives.

Female characters in Baal are good (and ultimately dead) or else they’re bad examples who are schooled by Cassius. Almost all of them want to sleep with him except the ones he actually wants—but nothing good, plot-wise, comes of being a girl who friendzones Cassius. Most implausible is the sequence where the church secretary, old enough to be his mother, flirts aggressively with him in front of his entire religion class. Cassius attempts to seduce her and then helpfully tells her, “If you weren’t confused, you’d kiss me tonight.”

Cassius’s savage war against the Chief of Police is motivated by the Chief’s abuse of his daughter and the complicity of the Chief’s neighbors, something Cassius hears about second-hand. He gives a great deal of thought to the feel of the sexual abuse the daughter must endure, and to his “duty” of violence. Unfortunately the daughter herself is virtually absent from the novel. This is doubly frustrating because some of the most subtly written scenes in the book depict Cassius’s conversations with his mother and with a sexual partner, Tina—at least until they veer off into Cassius’s sage corrections of petty female misapprehensions.

Readers should also be aware that Harms’s characters use racial and homophobic slurs freely. Cassius is white and straight; his best friend Max is black and coming to terms with being gay. At one point the boys pretend to be a gay couple, mockingly and with grotesque exaggeration, in order to anger and disgust their enemies. The book’s handling of queerness and race seems sometimes almost to tip over into a kind of masculinity-sentimentality, but the book also manages to treat race, racism, queerness and homophobia all as aspects of the world rather than as special problem topics or as things which must not be named. Many horror novels are haunted by racism and homophobia; relatively few center gay characters or characters of color.

Perhaps the most difficult to accept aspect of Baal is its treatment of bodily difference. From the very first scene, when evil is introduced via a hermaphroditic man with Downs syndrome, Harms uses grotesque, rubbernecking descriptions of age, disability, and body size to signal the presence of evil. In the final, apocalyptic sequence, disabled bodies are torn apart and victimized, while Harms refers to each one as “a Downs.” Much is made of the fatness of these disabled men, and of what Harms perceives as their sexual childishness and ambiguity.

Fatness, indeed, justifies almost anything here. Fat Rosemary in “religionclass” is, naturally, a hypocrite and a bully, and we’re meant to sympathize with Cassius, Max, and their friend Henry as they target her. Tina’s mother is called “the Cow”; per the narrative, she has chosen to become too fat to get out of bed, just as she chooses to lie in her own shit. Fatness justifies the book’s rape joke—not only do we hear Henry repeat the old canard about how a fat woman is too ugly to be a rape victim, but Cassius reflects that “Henry is right, nothing is sacred beyond laughter.” No one laughs at Cassius, but the reader is invited to laugh at this trio of fat women.

Baal, in short, risks reinscribing for the reader the very hierarchical, hateful, violent father-system it denounces at a rhetorical level. That is by no means all this intelligent, creepy book does—but it is impossible to ignore.

Baal is a beautiful, fascinating and thoughtful horror novel—a Midwestern regional novel in a genre that tends to be either placeless or coastal, and a novel which names and foregrounds race and sexuality. But it still reiterates some of the more conservative horror tropes: abused and dead girls as fascination and motivation for the boys and as titillation and motivation for the reader, boys as heroes and moral actors, the physically different as a marker of evil. Perhaps future work from Harms will be as innovative about gender and embodiment as Baal is about language and region.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Bryan Stevenson
Spiegel & Grau ($16)

by George Longenecker

Bryan Stevenson has been on the front lines of social justice, as an attorney representing some of the neediest prisoners in the nation and as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Just Mercy is a compelling narrative on the themes of economic and racial bias. Using stories of his clients, he paints pictures of human beings on the margins of the U.S. legal system.

Henry was the first death row prisoner Stevenson met: “He was a young, neatly-groomed African American man with short hair . . . wearing bright, clean prison whites. He looked immediately familiar to me, like everyone I grew up with.” Stevenson began his visits to Georgia’s death row afraid of what he’d find; he left calmed by Henry’s appreciation and determined to do more to help him. “I finished my internship committed to helping the death row prisoners I had met that month . . . I went back to law school with an intense desire to understand the laws and doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty and extreme punishments.”

Stevenson says that he could identify with his clients because of his upbringing “in a poor, rural, racially segregated settlement on the eastern shore of . . . Delaware where the racial history of this country casts a long shadow.” Like the prisoners he represents, the people he grew up with were “marginalized and excluded.”

It is the marginalized and excluded that Stevenson focuses on in this book, and their stories are compelling. Some are on death row; others were sentenced to adult prisons as children and have served decades for crimes that would have warranted juvenile adjudication and probation in some states. Trina Garnett, for example, was sentenced to life without parole in Pennsylvania after she unintentionally started a fire that killed two boys. She turned fifty-two last year and has been in prison for thirty-eight years. Ian Manuel was a thirteen-year-old neglected child when he shot and wounded Debbie Baigre during a bungled robbery in Florida. He too received life without parole; when he arrived at the Apalachee Correctional Institution, the guards could not find a uniform small enough to fit him. Despite his victim’s plea for a reduced sentence after he spent eighteen years in solitary confinement, Ian received no mercy from the courts. Florida has sentenced more than 100 children to life without parole for non-homicide offenses, most of them black or Latino.

Stevenson tells these stories with skill and compassion. He goes on to remind the reader that when an innocent person is wrongly convicted, the real perpetrator goes free. Through his legal successes and failures, Stevenson has maintained his faith and determination. He speaks eloquently of the ineffectiveness and injustice of executions and child incarceration and gives faces to the castaways of American jurisprudence in a narrative interspersed with legal history and calls for reform.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Michael Booth
Picador ($ 26)

by Poul Houe

The author of this book is a Brit residing in Denmark and married to a native Dane. A tightrope-walking journalistic juggler, suspended between his title’s reluctant admiration of the Nordic countries and his subtitle’s pseudo-objective delight in debunking their virtues, he labors with some success to keep his balance and do justice to both sides.

Booth is fascinated by the record-setting happiness the world so obsesses about in modern Scandinavia. He finds much of the alleged bliss inconsistent with the reality on the ground he has come to know, chiefly from living in Denmark and touring the other Nordic countries. An urge to drive a critical wedge—and to build a bridge of understanding—between these conflicting perceptions propels his book and accounts for much of its idiosyncratic zeal and entertaining wit.

So, how does such a progressive and egalitarian part of the world, blessed with social trust, free education, and universal health care, function in populations short of social intelligence and politeness? How does national happiness square with a dismal climate and sky-high taxes? How can social mores informed by ethnic homogeneity be considered inclusive without successfully accommodating ethnic newcomers? Booth is puzzled and dead set on decoding the enigma.

His journey through the maze of contradictions and ambiguities starts in his adopted Denmark, the happiest of nations. He detects the source of its happiness in the social communion that has arisen around Denmark’s incessant historical loss of power. An equally shared experience, it yielded the social trust from which the Danish welfare state emerged.

Secular Lutheran with a vengeance, Denmark has managed to sustain this costly design; but the inclusiveness has come at the price of vindictive social controls like the so-called Jante law, hidden by a facade of hygge, or coziness. The accretion of denial and complacency shows in prohibitive taxes, decreasing equality, schools promoting social cohesion by tilting towards lowest common denominators, and welfare recipients exploiting the system’s vulnerability.

A contrarian liberal, Booth is not advocating “the rampantly individualistic, child-of-Thatcher, ‘greed is good’ atmosphere prevalent in Britain” during his childhood. But he routinely challenges the Danish model with such alternatives, which—interestingly—were to materialize in a remote part of Scandinavia itself.

Of Iceland, he notes that its millennium-old offspring of West Norwegian escapees makes it Scandinavian at its roots. Yet its remoteness and puny-sized population, combined with Booth’s ephemeral knowledge of its history, warrant but a cursory story of modern day Icelanders and how their Scandinavian ways fell prey to neo-liberal capitalism at its worst. As its famed Blue Lagoon turns out to be a power plant’s wastewater, Iceland itself emerges from Booth’s account as an incestuous mini-nation of boozing elves leaping wildly from rags to riches and back again.

Contrast that, as the next and longer chapter does, with Norway, the Icelanders’ land of origin, which has also traveled from poverty to wealth in recent memory. The difference is obviously that its fortune (of enormous oil resources) has not been squandered. Still, as a land of nature, rather than culture, with periphery at center stage, the contrast is not complete. Norway’s “lottery rollover,” according to Booth, has excreted an oily psyche, a mix of spoiling laziness and low-grade racism.

The admittedly most favored nation in Booth’s rollout follows next: Finland. In one sense the most Scandinavian of all, in another not Scandinavian in the least, its understated no nonsense culture and population of unsophisticated, quiet loners appeal to the author, who barely winces when he notes a Finnish core of male alcoholic aggression and contempt for effeminate Swedes.

Yet while Finns may be better technicians than marketers, their deftness in foreign affairs and superior education domestically—all schoolteachers hold masters degrees—speak loudly of a taciturn nation of “rare, stoic heroism.” With its future ahead of it, Finland is part of Scandinavia and Europe at large, as the case may be, as one of Booth’s local witnesses testifies.

Finally, at book’s end there is Sweden. Its social policies have been spectacular, yet problems continue to pop up. The conflict shy Swedes are duktiga, or clever in a verbally reticent way, and they value consensus, the lagom: neither too much, nor too little. Compassion is in evidence but often seems bordering on indifference, if not rudeness.

Many find this social democratic modernity conformist and introvert, and Booth deems it at least benignly totalitarian and explains it with reference to Sweden’s dubious neutrality during World War II. Today’s multicultural political correctness is fit to divert attention from a record of shameful pro-German sentiments (and devotion to racial biology).

Some of these propositions are problematic, which Booth seems to realize as he spends his final pages on resetting the balance he initially set out to strike between fair admiration and well-pointed criticism of the Scandinavian way of life. For all its shortcomings, this region is “still the enviably rich, peaceful, harmonious, and progressive place it has long been,” and its exceptionalism is “a standard of education [that] is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge.”

Even Scandinavia’s controversial multiculturalism and immigration policies are now declared likely role models. Indeed, the restrictive Danish variant, blasted by Booth initially, is ultimately projected a winner—“I would argue that Denmark seems to be leading the way toward a properly integrated, multiethnic Nordic society”; as “the Danes have been confronted more directly with the challenges of integration . . . they have also made more progress.”

Why this partial retraction of earlier critical points? Weren’t they thought-provoking and deserving to stand uncompromised? And if an argument was overstated, as it sometimes was, ought the correction not to be made on location? Instead, Booth typically resorts to opening a polemic with self-deprecating humor. Or so it seems; what looks so disarming at first glance too often proves predictably self-serving on closer inspection.

A passionate outsider on the Scandinavian scene, Booth observes much that seems less visible to insiders but also misses much they would have noted. His disparagement of Swedish neutrality during World War II is but one case in point. He arrests the German leanings but not the safe haven provided for many Jews at mortal risk in Hitler’s Europe. He has pithy formulations about Sweden as a more technical than cultural society and rightly suggests a conflict between modern Sweden and the homegrown roots of its modernity. But he often lets personal, or British, biases—coyly articulated old world gender views, say—stand in the way of his critical pursuits. And many heavyweight authorities that could have helped restore his balance are conspicuous by their absence. He does cite a number of socio-cultural informants, but besides being quite few, they are disproportionately naturalized foreigners or expatriated nationals with perspectives akin to his, and with a knowledge that is similarly slanted or tenuously grounded.

This book is neither a scholarly dissertation nor a journalistic polemic. It’s an in between, executed with colloquial precision and general eloquence. Neither its share of factual errors and misconstructions, nor its occasional loss of balance on the tightrope between analysis and judgment, should discourage readers from dissecting its results.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Lionel G. Fogarty
Vagabond Press ($25)

by Robert Wood

Precious little has been written on Lionel Fogarty’s poetic consciousness, or where to situate him in a global literary economy. An indigenous Australian writer, Fogarty is mostly considered alongside Ali Coby Eckermann and Samuel Wagan Watson in a red, yellow, and black identity politics triumvirate—and indeed, one can see in Fogarty’s writing a DuBoisean “double consciousness,” the common walking-in-two-worlds theme. But Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future) demands a new analysis.

For Fogarty’s latest work, the term “homonymic consciousness” comes to mind. A homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings. It is thus about unity and multiplicity at once. Fogarty’s latest work shows a remarkable unity of purpose, voice, and outlook: it is not sameness, however, because there is thrilling multiplicity in his formal invention, from acrostic (“A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A”) to long narrative (“Thirty Years from 1983”) to numbered statement (“Register Donate”)—not to mention a multiplicity of emotion (from anger to admonishment to regret).

What results from reading homonymity into this work is the recognition of Fogarty’s distinct poetic idiom, which allows readers to reconsider indigenous sovereignty and power in a contested and occupied Australia. However, to label indigenous poetry simply as a poetry of protest undermines the work’s capriciousness and diversity. In Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), we get a complicated, dense, moving portrait of life in all its forms. The reader is challenged, opened up, and eventually lulled by this book. Moreover, we cannot separate out resistance from utopia; there is not only protest here, but also the evocation of a created world. It is this combination that makes Fogarty so compelling.

In his Sydney Review of Books essay on “The Poet Tasters,” Ben Etherington noted the prevailing whiteness of poetry and its reviewers in Australia. Fogarty not only stands out for his appreciable non-whiteness, but also because his poetry works to defamiliarize “the poetry community” from its linguistic surroundings. Few other poets can say they have a brother who died at police hands, and that othered experience comes through in his language. Perhaps Fogarty’s true poetic antecedents can be found in anthropological journals, colonists’ diaries, and explorers’ letters; in these sources we can read transcriptions of songs and myths told in indigenous voices but which deny an authorial identity. The emphasis on repetition common to many song poems comes through in poems like “Maps Gods To Whose,” “Country’s Sub’s No Suss Towns,” and “Olive Pink Fly Over Sums.”

There is also a root in ongoing oral traditions and an international context of which Fogarty is a part, which might account for why Fogarty writes how he does as well as for where we place him. Indeed, the reader will very much recognize the spoken voice in this book. Consider for example the lead poem “Murgon Brawl Cherbourg Brawls,” which begins, “They out there, not hidden / Have you heard of that brawl?” We can see a casual ordinary speech combined with direct address and line breaks, which, when taken together demand the reader to pause and reflect—is the poet speaking of us, asking of us, are we in the space of Poetry or a casual, passing conversation? The language might be ordinary but the rhythm is not. It reminds us, in its use of the vernacular, of some Caribbean writers (Mervyn Morris for instance), Black British writers like Linton Kwesi Johnson for its content, and some Americans, primarily Amiri Baraka, for its intensity. Recasting Fogarty in such a transnational Black milieu forces us to think through the nodes of association, the networks of relation, and the politics of criticism.

When reading Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), one will recognize the linguistic dexterity, unique sound shape, unity of purpose, and multiple meaning of words. For readers unaccustomed to his work, it is a good place to begin. For readers expecting more of the same, it is striking for its cohesiveness and power, which only grows with the volume. We must read Fogarty in light of traditions not immediately considered poetic, as well as in contexts that account for more than Australia. It is exciting to think of Fogarty as a starting point for many to experience the vast diversity of Australian literature.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015