Review: Things OK with you?
Reviewed by Paula Green
Reviewed by: Paula Green
Author:Vincent O’Sullivan
Publisher:Victoria University Press
ISBN:9781776564132
Date Published:08 March 2021
Pages:96
Format:Paperback
RRP:$25.00
Vincent O’Sullivan’s substantial new poetry book Things OK with you? bucks the current trend and includes neither endnotes nor acknowledgements. He lets the poems speak for themselves. They are, of course, part of his writing continuum; his poetry relishes ideas, experience, lyricism, physical detail to the point of shimmer.
Perhaps this new collection is pared back in tone but the poet is speaking to us without discarding intricate sound effects and the exquisite metaphors that have been his trademark (he is deft at both).
I stand in the corner of a world
that is more curious than essential to me,
I look across a narrow slug of water,
watched a swayed cage clank tourists
over black surges to an island
where history behaved as history does,
badly.
from The unexpected man
I feel like I am reading inside poem thickets, with an interplay of light and dark, and multiple pathways. There is a probing mind at work here. The subjects range from a man watching and becoming the sea to eating a cheese roll to a busy day to defending adjectives to a giant’s tale. There is wit and humour.
I know there are writing instructors
who’ll tell you, ‘Shy clear of the adjectival,’
as though they’re telling hikers to avoid
tracks buzzed with wild honey.
from In defence of the adjectival
At times O’Sullivan writes as storyteller, stepping into the shoes of others, building tiny narratives that have ambiguous links to the poet’s personal experience. The poem thickets are full of fiction more than searing self-exposures (there is little contemplation of old age that you find in some older poets). Yes, the voice speaking may or may not be the poet (this simply does not matter), but the strength of the writing is in the personal musing. These poems are reflecting back and forward, absorbing life and living, unafraid of opinions and ideas.
The willows’ cages trace the curving river.
Behind them, skeletal birches tell you,
‘This is the story, the one you stand in.’
from Soon enough, then
I love this poem. The way it places you in a scene, in the here and now, in a story (in a poem). What animates the ideas is the fluent storytelling combined with piquant detail and the steady, lyrical flow.
O’Sullivan never stops savouring what words can do. Some poems show his word-love in the agile sonic crafting, while others make a fascination with words visible.
The word has something kindly about it,
though trees must hate it. ‘Don’t even finish
the word!’ a larch shivers, and the orchard, maybe,
shaking enough to bring apples down.
from Woodsman
O’Sullivan also hints at his reading life with poems dedicated to or referencing writers including Iris Murdoch, Wallace Stevens, Henry James. A fertile and necessary reading life lies behind the scenes of these poems.
At the end of reading and musing on these poems, I decided O’Sullivan’s new collection is a form of poetry as mesh. The poems and collection as a whole resemble a web, an interlacing of ideas, things, experiences, characters, musical fluencies, silences, humour, story, admissions. There is the glorious meshing of elements between you the reader, the poem and even the poet and his pen. One poem explores this so beautifully and is the perfect entry to a mesmerising collection.
A man is watching the sea.
His line tremors, the man becomes
the sea. The blue that enlisted
forever, the uncounted sunsets,
the lines slanted like nylon rain
of those who fish close beside him,
waiting the sea to signal pain.
from Only connect . . .
Reviewed by Paula Green
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