|
What a gift from Liz Winfield and Cornford Press this book
is! We get not only Liz's poems (57 of them, by the way,
and far more nourishing than you-know-whose baked beans or
tinned spaghetti); we also get Fiona Cooke's cover-image
photo, 'The Kitchen'. When Tim showed me the black and white
proof of this, my heart turned over. There was Betty
Nicholson's kitchen at 52 Montague Street where
so many of us in the writing community here were welcomed
in
and
nurtured. The
memories flooded in.
At the beginning of 1975, Betty took me in and I lived
there for four months, together with my children and our
cats and dogs, while we waited to move into the house where
I still live now. From the moment I walked in her door, I
was part of Betty's extended 'family' and I met those who
came after me to take refuge there: students, travellers,
artists, writers, for whom Betty's doors were always open.
Hospitality was a way of life with her.
Remember the parties she gave? There was always one for
each FAW anthology and others to launch or promote books
by local writers - Norma & Colin Knight, Terri Moore,
Vera Read, Gwen Harwood, Margaret Giordano, Audrey Holliday & Wal
Eastman, Jennie Herrera and Anne Kellas to name just a few.
And Tim Thorne launched Eric Beach's Weeping for Lost
Babylon there.
And there were workshops. FAW and the Writers' Union organised
tutors, including Libby Hathorn, Garry Disher, Dorothy Porter,
Kristin Henry. Whoever got there first would load the old
pram with wood for fires at each end of the living room.
In the breaks, Betty would be in the kitchen , back to the
fire, wearing her eyeshade, reading palms, while someone
loaded the squeaky traymobile with mugs and pots of coffee
and tea.
Several writers' groups met regularly at 52 as well. We'd
sit around that kitchen table sharing food and drink, stories
and poems. The group Liz and Fiona and I belonged to went
on meeting there for a year or so after this cover photo
was taken at the time that Betty died.
'Yellow,'Liz said when I asked her about the background
colour for the cover. 'You can't go past yellow. ' Liz is
an artist and she knows about colour: the yellow jug of daffodils
on the table that day; sunshine; lamplight; honey from the
beehive on the verandah; yellow-hearted flames in that kitchen
where a fire always burned.
My mind was filled with yellow as I read the proofs of
Liz's poems. I found myself recalling bits of information
from Alexander Theroux's long essay on yellow in The Primary
Colours. The sound of music in the key of D Major is
yellow; Duke Ellington's unison clarinets are chrome yellow.
A yellow flag is flown on a ship or outside a house in quarantine,
to warn of danger. I imagined these pages of poems bristling
with those little sticky labels Liz loves to use. There'd
be one on the opening poem, for sure.
Warning
the following contains
sex, violence
and adult themes
I am a confessional poet
My life is
an SBS movie
trust me
I only tell
the truth
The poems that follow, beginning with the title poem 'Too
Much Happens', examine with searing honesty that SBS-movie
life of hers. They recall family members, friends; they deal
with disappointment, anger, loss, grief, loneliness, isolation,
illness, pain. You've heard lots of them. They move you to
tears ; but Liz's voice is strong, clear, unwavering. You're
always aware of the humour, often ironic, and the deep love
and compassion that underpin all these poems, so that even
the darkest or most tragic poem is somehow triumphant, too.
There may be 'a zinc-works halo on every full moon'; lots
of her friends may live in houses 'slumped down one side/
like a stroke victim's smile', but Liz's optimism and joie
de vivre are intact. Look at 'A Dangerous Day', or the one
that has become her signature poem, 'Honey', or 'The Things
I look Forward To', or the closing lines of 'Night' (for
Jenny Barnard):
and I laugh for this
low-slung moon
with its promises
of rain and rainbows
and frogs to sing
the new night in
And a new day will follow, yellow with sunlight. Did you
know that yellow is the colour of the third chakra, seat
of the emotions, of self-image and personal power? How exactly
right that colour is to bind these poems.
Summing up that essay, Theroux remembers Conrad's Charlie
Marlow saying, 'I was going into the yellow'. He could have
been referring to Liz's poems: 'Desire and renunciation.
Dreams and decadence. Shining light and shallowness. Gold
here. Grief there ... glory in one instance and, in yet another,
painful, disturbing estrangement ... The Yellow Brick Road.
The Heart of Darkness. We go into the yellow, I suppose,
each in our own way. '
Some lines from Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)
sum up for me the way Liz does it:
'And she walks firmly through the colour
yellow to cry ...'
In Malaysia they launch little yellow ships to carry away
illness and disease. Let's see if launching a yellow book
can do the same and send Too Much Happens out into
the world.
Robyn Mathison
|
