Patricia Prime
The Song of Globule: 80 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2020), 82pp, $25; Heroides: 15 sonnets by Stephen Oliver (Puriri Press, 2020), 24pp, $20
The Song of Globule by Stephen Oliver contains 80 sonnets and 14 pages of notes. Oliver is an Australasian poet and author of 21 volumes of poetry. In this volume, Oliver mines his experiences of living in Sydney in order to construct a convincing portrait of an ethereal young woman, Globule, footloose in Sydney and yet also tethered to it. From the first sonnet, ‘escape from Eden’, where he asks:
Did Globule sprout seraphic wings for flight?
not beneath this bumpy sky—not tonight.
to the final sonnet, ‘follow the rails’, via a variety of dramatic episodes and scenarios, he traces Globule’s adventures and misadventures in a phantasmagoric cityscape. Sonnet 3, ‘bad boys & grungy bars’ tells us of Globule’s escape by City Rail to the Inner West:
She niggled and nudged at her comfort zone,
the harbour bride arched, a grey bird of prey.
A fantasist, she has no doubts about her rosy future, even while she fancies that ‘dude with the hot rod’. However, the eventual dashing of unrealistic expectations and her self-centredness are tropes throughout the collection. Globule turns out to be a young woman who is hoping for ‘some sort of revelation’, but instead finds that as Sonnet 6, ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’ puts it:
A face stared back impassive. Goat-grey eyes,
half-surprised at, whatever, nothing much.
Her face, friendly as—in the mirror’s clutch,
hungered for a grip on life, love and lies.
Just one more girl in search of some hero.
This undercurrent of pathos undercuts this character’s air of insouciance while in quest of true love. It adds emotional resonance to a shape-shifting and time-shifting narrative of gritty urban alienation. Oliver’s sonnets about a billboard, a siren song, a wormhole—or indeed any of the other sonnets—document vignettes of survival, resilience and the thick skin needed to be a young woman alone in the city. In Sonnet 15, Globule is no longer a teenager ‘watching gulls circle off Circular Quay’, but, matured by experience, can ghost any young man who doesn’t meet her standards:
Nevertheless, she knows herself quite well,
reaction meant, more or less, attraction;
be in the moment, never let it go,
for long as it lasted (like) with some Joe.
To give the flick was simple subtraction—
just deleting his number from her cell.
Each sonnet reveals some facet of the protagonist’s life, as in Sonnet 21, ‘where on this motley map’, which concerns Globule’s yearnings for ‘adventure’:
Wherever she looked adventure beckoned;
autumn arrived with its rustling poplars.
But where on this motley map should she go,
maybe just throw a dart and make it so?
Oh, to chill on a Belize beach, topless.
A one-way ticket, get out—she reckoned.
Juxtaposition is where the comedy of the sonnets exists, as we see in Sonnet 24, ‘womby vaultage’, in which Globule finds a quiet place (St Mary’s) to contemplate her future:
Something she sensed or did not understand,
this monthly rebellion of the hormones
as her body ping-ponged with pheromones.
Pews empty as an abandoned grandstand,
there she stayed for awhile—feeling at odds.
In Sonnet 28, ‘scattered husks’, Globule decides that responsibilities don’t overly trouble her and the horizon is wide. As day becomes a blur, she concludes:
If life proved to be nothing but a farce,
on balance—she didn’t give a rat’s arse.
But in Sonnet 35, ‘outside of time’, she is beginning to be aware of ‘nothing but the dumb echo of her heart’. She feels oddly displaced, ‘outside of time, / a mass of protons that could not survive’. Her sense of disconnection builds, and in Sonnet 45, ‘Mount Athos’, she sits in an art gallery, ‘frozen before the portrait’:
A thought floated up inside Globule’s head,
‘how can you be desperate if you’re dead’.
Contemporary life in the Big Bad City is the concern of many of the sonnets, as we find in Sonnet 52, ‘bad mistake’, where Globule is walking through an insalubrious part of Sydney:
Slap bang into the middle of Redfern,
figures in doorways, she stared straight ahead;
had come out onto that infamous street—
bad mistake, skin prickly, heavy heartbeat
In general, this is a technically accomplished collection of sonnets, both knowledgeable about and mindful of poetry’s classical traditions. Take, for instance, Sonnet 55, ‘never look back’. The effusive beginning:
From Ovid, through Virgil, Sir Orfeo,
there are many who sing of Orpheus;
his doomed quest to retrieve Eurydice;
Lot’s wife turned into salt by the Dead sea.
reminds this reader of several great classics: Orpheus and Eurydice, Virgil’s Georgics, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and the Breton lai, Sir Orfeo. In Sonnet 59, ‘techies and hipsters’, Globule is portrayed not as a typically well-behaved young woman but as one adrift who prefers ‘bars full of techies and hipsters / as psychic songs played in her head, unheard’. The sonnet, though, ends perhaps a little too pat with the rhyming couplet:
As to sexual hijinks, no question,
such hurdles were purely equestrian.
Devastating bush fires take on a symbolic force in Sonnet 62, ‘passed her by’:
In the cold snap of this dream a bushfire
rose and raged silent as some virus through
her veins, crowning the patter of her heart,
that pulse of flame, and woke her with a start …
In this same sonnet, Globule is forced to acknowledge the impossibility of finding the perfect man. She ends up turning to ‘an old book called Heroides’ instead. In the final poem about Globule, Sonnet 63, ‘hearts that harden’, we find her sitting in a beer garden beneath a frangipani tree, reading Ovid. The sonnet ends:
Once, it was looking ahead, now it’s back,
had she now found herself on the right track?
Poems 64 to 78, are Oliver’s rendering of Ovid’s fifteen epistolary poems, Heroides, which are also published as a separate chapbook (see below). There isn’t space to go into everything this saga of Globule encompasses, but undeniably Oliver demonstrates considerable mastery of poetic form. The Song of Globule is not only a story of female angst and empowerment but also a celebration of the grungy atmosphere of the Inner-West environs of present-day Sydney.
Heroides: 15 Sonnets is Stephen Oliver’s rendering of the ancient Roman poet Ovid’s fifteen epistolary poems — supposedly written by heroines from classic mythology—into sonnets. The poems are legends of love, courage, determination, murder, death and survival. The first sonnet, ‘Penelope to Ulysses’, tells a story that will be familiar to many readers. It presents us with the figure of the legendary Penelope awaiting the return of her long-absent husband, Ulysses—the hero of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey—from his voyages. After fighting the war against the city of Troy with the Greeks, Ulysses sailed home, obstructed along the way by a demanding assortment of trials and tribulations. Meanwhile, Penelope has borne him a son while remaining plagued by importunate suitors. The sonnet ends with her heartfelt cry:
I pray for your return, yet I falter,
your son, Telemachus, needs his father.
The third sonnet, ‘Briseis to Achilles’, depicts Briseis lamenting, through her tears, for Achilles. Briseis is a character in Homer’s other great epic poem, The Iliad. She was the wife of Mynes, taken as the spoils of war by Achilles and given as a war bride to Agamemnon, then later returned to Achilles. The sonnet’s lines invoke the misery of her situation. The poem begins:
I write tearful words, I fear it’s too late,
you handed me over to men the king
sent without so much as one farewell kiss.
‘Oenone to Paris’ begins with the waspish words of the abandoned wife of Paris, whom he left for the beautiful Helen, Queen of Sparta. Oenone admonishes him and warns him not to hoist sail for Sparta, telling him he will bring about his destruction. She declares:
My love given is true, not like that slag—
you will return after wading through gore.
Oliver’s sonnet captures a sense of the jilted wife’s anguish, with its despair, anger and frustration:
You beg me to heal your wounds, I will not,
far as I’m concerned, Paris, you can rot!
In sum, the sonnets skilfully retell Ovid’s stories, freighted as they are with sexual intrigue, conniving, and mad passion. Dido commands Aeneas in ‘Dido to Aeneas’ to:
Go, depart, the uncoupling sea calls you,
inconstant lover who beached on these shores.
I brought you to safety behind wide walls,
honoured your person in glittering halls.
Carthage stands strong against threatening wars
Yet my brother in Tyre wants me dead too.
Dido is a widowed queen, who entertains Prince Aeneas when he is shipwrecked on his way to what would become ‘Italy’ to found Rome. She chides him as her ‘inconstant lover’, yet she commands him not to forget her:
know me for the one who will remember;
recall then my touch, both faint and ghostly.
Aeneas, your fleet rides in the roadstead,
one last time you rough-handled me to bed.
In ‘Hermione to Orestes’, Hermione complains, ‘Pyrrhus tries to bully me into bed.’ Hermione, the daughter of the King of Sparta and Helen of Troy, was betrothed to Orestes. In the sonnet, she pleads with Orestes to ‘kill again for honour’. She is his prize, and she doesn’t want her father to give her to anyone else. The sonnet ends with this heartfelt question:
My tears fed with anger, I am helpless,
will I fall victim to rape, regardless?
In the sonnet, ‘Medea to Jason’, Medea is the daughter of a king, the niece of Circe, and the granddaughter of the sun-king, Helios. She prepares a magic potion for Jason to enable him to complete the tasks set for him by his father. In the sonnet, she rages against Jason, who has betrayed her with a new wife. Aggrieved, she swears she will have revenge:
Now it’s my company you can’t abide —
would your heart grow fonder in my absence?
We were invincible, drank blood like wine.
So be it, banish me from your palace,
traitor! there are few bounds to my malice.
In the final sonnet, ‘Sappho to Phaon’, Sappho has written a letter trying to persuade the exquisite youth Phaon to return to her. She seeks to beguile him by recalling to his mind all that he once loved about her and her island:
If my lines tumble, do you wonder why?
Sappho is word-famous for her lyric
celebrating bright-eyed girls of these lands,
crowned with violet, dill woven garlands.
As Oliver demonstrates, the themes of love, loss and death are perennial, bridging the chasm between ancient and contemporary poetry. This is a deeply moving book; Oliver’s resources of imagery and feeling, and the energy and tact of their representation on the page, are superb. His Heroides works diligently to do justice to the art of the epistolary: the poem as a letter by one person addressed to someone else. Amid the rancour, hardships and grief of the characters, the sonnets make clear that the troubles they record and lament, and the moments of grace they find, are inextricably entwined with the lives of others.
PATRICIA PRIME is co-editor of the New Zealand haiku magazine, Kokako. She writes book reviews for a number of journals, including takahē (New Zealand), Gusts (Canada), Atlas Poetica (USA) and Muse (India).
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