Judith Beveridge, reviewing James Charlton's Luminous Bodies

There's much to admire in James Charlton's debut volume Luminous Bodies.

Charlton has a clear, discerning eye, which he turns on both the natural and the human worlds. But more than just imagistic virtuosity, there is in Charlton's work a defining sensibility: his openness to the world comes from a readiness of feeling which is grounded in both awe and gratitude, yet also in the sense that grief and loss, too, are ballast for spiritual vision.

Charlton's work makes a plea for experience "to pass beyond sense, reflective thought, its structures, definitions" (Tasman Peninsula) into an acceptance of the material world as a place in which boundaries and their concomitant divisive hierarchies can dissolve and thus make way for deeper, non-dualistic forms of communion. This idea is beautifully conveyed in "Truganini's Soliloquy" which sets the expansive, inclusive aboriginal mindset against the acquisitive and ego-ridden perceptions of the white men of which Truganini proclaims:

You have lost the all-embracing song
which nurtures the past
into the future. You have failed
to see the All-Encompasser:
One who in habits the wind,
without being it; One who dwells
within the cutting grass, but isn't botanical.

While it celebrates the natural world as a place for transcendence, Luminous Bodies also looks at human relationships as both places for communion and healing, and also as sites for cruelty, degradation and humiliation. Two love poems "Luminous Bodies" and "To Your Fully Open Eyes" are resonant for their finely achieved lyricism, and for the ways in which the lineation works to sustain feeling: the open, stepping lines distributing the rhythm so as the give a sense of levity and balance. Other poems "Koonya", "To Governor George Arthur in Heaven", "Hobart 4 pm, mid-winter", "4 Poems", "New Norcia Boys" - drawn from history or personal experience, poignantly illustrate how certain values and received ideas in the hands of people with positions of power become lethal. These poems set within Charlton's vision of compassion, understanding and the necessity for acting from a deep sense of oneness and interdependence, read all the more chilling, and remind us that they occurrences in time and place where these values are lacking. Charlton's matter-of-factness in the retelling brings the horror into striking relief:

They fed her in the sealers' hut,
changing the leash after each month's work....
He buttoned his trousers,
trussed up her legs,
took her out the back,
fired a flintlock in her ribs.
Koonya

Yet at times, Charlton's work can rely a little too heavily on a reporting style that doesn't lift the subject or the syntax into that which the poem is gesturing towards. Partly this is a problem with the work being strongly imagistic, and too content driven - the language not aspiring to much other than narrative clarity. "Each Needle Fuming", "Billy Ah Foo", "Breathing Boulder" need to have greater penetration in terms of what the language is achieving musically and rhythmically. Sentence structure is plodding and unvaried as in these lines from "Billy Ah Foo": A watering can/ gives shelter to a rainforest frog,/ as common in the shire, then,/ as an Edison cylinder./ The frog replies to Billy's simulated/ croak, his bleak rendition of the one,/ the lonely syllable. Bennett's wallabies/ pressure the house-paddock fencing." Charlton is better when he gives his form and language freer rein, or when the form pulls the syntactical structure away from itself to create tension and drama as in "Wedgetail" and "The Awesome Benefits of Idleness". But at his best, Charlton in Luminous Bodies is able to bring an admirable wholeheartedness to his subjects, allowing the reader to enter an authentically enlarged vision of both nature and ourselves, and he is a poet whose resolute voice is both instructive and comforting.

Written for Southerly originally; this review is not available in print form. (ed, 23 May 2004).

More reviews: Anne Kellas |: Judith Beveridge |: Dr Anuraag Sharma |: Tim Thorne |: Eleanora Court

© James Charlton