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Poems built to bridge chasms Robert Dessaix
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Rupture is a brutal word, a jarring word, not one you’d expect as the title of a poetry collection with roses on the cover. I felt uneasy about it when Susan Varga first told me that Rupture was the title she’d chosen for her first book of poetry, but I was wrong – it’s perfect. The poems bridge chasms, the poems heal rifts, but the title is still perfect. Here’s why. I’ve been in on Susan’s poetry from the beginning. Some five years ago, still shaky from a heart attack, I went to see her in the Southern Highlands where she spends the warmer months. She was even shakier after her recent stroke. After ten minutes of swooping, if garbled, conversation about everything under the sun, we both had to have a little lie-down. We’d sputtered out. Then we returned to the fray. She’d taken up writing poetry – despite everything, despite her years, despite words, sounds and sentences disappearing from her brain ‘like tumbleweed’, she’d started to write poetry. About the
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CHESS
by Ian Rogers 15-year-old Anton Smirnov produced one of Australia’s greatest Olympic performances and is now two thirds of the way to the Grandmaster title after a stunning 8.5/10 result at the Baku Chess Olympiad, which concluded in Azerbaijan last week. For the second consecutive Olympiad, Smirnov was undefeated, scoring 5.5 against seven Grandmaster opponents and beating all other opponents in his path. Smirnov helped lift Australia, seeded 45th in an Open Olympiad featuring 170 teams from 165 countries, to a tie for 24th place; the same position as Australia’s finish in the 2014 Tromso Olympiad where Smirnov made his stunning debut – again undefeated. In Baku Smirnov was only the best of Australia’s highlight reel, with top board David Smerdon, at his final Olympiad, drawing with World Champion Magnus Carlsen, while the team beat higher ranked opponents such as Brazil and Kazakhstan. Smerdon’s decision to retire from Olympic duty was due in
part to the realisation that his work as an economist was suffering from the enormous investment in time needed to keep his chess at a high level. However, with the rise of Smirnov and several other young players, Smerdon, 32 and a veteran of seven Olympiads, was confident that in two years’ time he would hardly be missed. The other veteran in the team, Zhao Zong Yuan, 30, is also mulling over his Olympic future given the demands of the medical profession. The Open Olympiad in Baku was won for the first time in 40 years by the USA, who needed a record winning score to edge out Ukraine on tiebreak, with top seed Russia third. The Australian women’s team were seeded 54th and finished tied for 59th after a mediocre performance against a series of young and under-rated opponents. China broke a 12-year drought to win the Women’s Olympiad in Baku, a great relief not only for the top seeded Chinese team but also for World Women’s Champion Hou Yifan, who had not seen team gold since she made her debut in 2006.
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Brunswick Heads poet Susan Varga. Photo Jeff Dawson
brutal fissure in her life. I read them. We’ve always talked in a spirited sort of way. In the mid-1950s at the age of ten we were already at it in the school playground in suburban Sydney. Language was what I loved about Susan from the very start. She spoke Hungarian. To me this was exciting beyond all imagining. So I went and learnt Russian (not quite grasping the political irony). On weekends I would often go to the telephone box nearest my house, insert twopence and talk to Susan until someone forced me to hang up. I can vividly remember the smell of that stuffy telephone box to this day. The Romans had a phrase for what happened next: pari passu. For the next six decades we went through life pari passu – in step with each other, without meaning to be. At times we lost sight of each other for long periods; we married partners of the opposite sex, thought better of it and found someone of our
own sex to love forever; we became writers, publishing books about our mothers in the same year, Susan’s Heddy and Me, a triumph of undiminished power; we moved about, Susan to Brunswick Heads for much of each year and I to Tasmania; and we fended off death in the same Sydney hospital at much the same time, unbeknownst to each other. And we’ve both written about it. You know something when you’re ten – there’s no doubt about it. You can spot a kindred spirit before you can even spell it. And at ten you have the innocent effrontery to be able to say without further ado to whoever you’ve espied: I like you very much. I think I might like to know you always. Rupture had its first crowded launch at the newly restored Brunswick Picture House in Brunswick Heads (to be followed by launches in Sydney, Melbourne and one or two cities in between). Could anything be more stylish? More in keeping with the mind that crafted these
LETTERS from page 10 commercial activities. Partly because of the quite extraordinary historical delays in having sometimes quite simple DAs approved in Council Chambers (and the associated nitpicking that often drives applicants to despair), a culture has developed of ‘let’s get on with it and do it anyway and if Council jacks up we’ll negotiate and put in a DA’. I suspect that the other component in this attitude is an often somewhat belligerent attitude towards bureaucracy by those who have moved here expecting a rather more laissez-faire regulatory environment. One can hardly be
surprised at potential developers adopting this modus operandi when one looks at the example of a recently re-elected councillor (and mayoral candidate, no less) who has become an arch-exponent of this approach and who is currently operating two identical storage business activities on his rural property, neither of which is covered by a current DA. Apparently, the scratchy, hand-written DA lodged by him for yet another hugely expanded operation is sufficient for the Council’s planning and compliance staff to leave him to operate these largely unregulated activities continued on page 14
poems? (I’m tempted to follow suit, pari passu, when my next book is launched.) Susan’s is not a dark book, it’s a book that thumbs its nose at death and disease, it cocks an undaunted snook at them – Susan and her partner Anne Coombs are both difficult to daunt – without a whiff of that self-regarding pained bravery that characterises so many works by survivors. With simplicity the opening poems do describe finding herself in hospital (the floating sensation, the unearthly quality), her fellow patients in the ward, going home again with ‘a hole in my brain’, an early frightening breach with Anne. All the same, she has not ‘come undone’, as she says she has, and begins to seize hold of life again with a gentle fierceness: first the house in the Highlands which she has to own anew (the light in it, the colours, furniture, books and paintings, the views, even the ants); then friends and loves and fears; then Sydney (‘you old harlot’) where her senses come alive again; her dogs; and Brunswick Heads in all its flamboyance and greyness and peace and frenzy; and everywhere Anne. This is exactly right for the months and years after you’ve sidestepped death: hospital, home and the one at the heart of it all, everything slightly askew, bathed in a fresh light. The words are back. Q Robert Dessaix is the author of several memoirs, essay collections and novels, including Night Letters, A Mother’s Disgrace and, most recently, What Days Are For. He lives in Hobart. Rupture by Susan Varga (UWA Publishing) is available at local bookstores.
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo