Subliminal Dust, by Pooja Mittal: Poetry from Odyssey Books

Silence is never silent so long as there is a listening ear. (Back cover of book.)

I have read Subliminal Dust right through four times now and I am still finding lines to enjoy afresh and differently. The poems bring out voices in movements, whispers amid chaos, sounds trapped in small rocks, the stretching voids of unspoken emotions, terribly pale silences.

There is music in this triangle, as in a shell ..

Iain Sharp of The Sunday Star said of Pooja Mittal, ‘Exceptional … A voice rather like that of a Zen master – insightful and enigmatic in about equal measure’. Zen often springs to mind on reading her poems, in particular the notion of koans.

Kōan, in Zen Buddhism of Japan, is described as a succinct paradoxical statement or question. The effort to “solve” a koan is intended to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, readying the mind to entertain an appropriate response on the intuitive level.

I don’t suggest that Mittal intended her work in quite that way but certainly her images and unexpected juxtapostions had that effect for me. They set you loose from the usual tightness of linguistic meanings and adrift into the spaces and arenas of one’s own mind.

Gentle universes that float past
like tall, starry ships .

A favourite poem for me is ‘Seducing A Poem’ (p. 26), which so well conveys the frustrations of writers and the patience needed to bring to the fore that elusive something that you know you must write down, somehow.

.. come here poppet on little black shoes ..

Pooja Mittal has been widely published since the age of 13. At 17 she was the youngest Featured Poety ever in Poetry New Zealand. In 2007 she was featured in The Best Australian Poetry 2007. Her work has been performed in Moscow in Russian translation.

Subliminal Dust was published 2010 published by Odyssey Books .
Where to find it: On Amazon it is only $1 to buy in digital but I recommend the Paperback so that you can dip into it off. everal outlets on Abebooks.com that also have it.

A Perfect Square, by Isobel Blackthorn

From the book’s cover: When pianist Ginny Smith moves back to her mother’s house in Sassafras after her breakup with the degenerate Garth .. eccentric artist Harriet Brassington-Smythe is beside herself and contrives a creative collaboration to lift her daughter’s spirits: an exhibition of paintings and songs … As Ginny tries to prise the truth of her father’s disappearance from a tight-lipped Harriet, both are launched into their own inner worlds of dreams, speculations and remembering.

Harriet, living amid forests in Victoria, paints abstracts of the downs of south England. Judith, living in another place, the south of England, and indeed, in another time line, paints landscapes of a country she has never seen, the Wimmera of her imagination. To the dismay of each, their respective daughters abruptly return home, escaping awful men, ‘The Degenerate’, ‘The Troll’.

‘Happenstance would lodge in (Harriet’s) imagination, resonant with significances’. Ch. 1

A feast for the reader, this multi-layered novel is itself resonant with significances, some increasingly disturbing, such as the recurring appearance of the triptych in black, white and grey by ‘an unknown artist’. This was purchased by Harriet’s agent Phoebe. But no buyer wants it. We later learn it was commissioned by Judith’s own business friend, Bethany, from Judith herself, who disliked painting it. Progressing from one deceased estate sale to another, this thing trails ominously across the novel. More shadows disturb the gardens, friendships, music and art filling so much of the book: Ginny’s nightmares, the conspiracy theories to which Judith feels morbidly drawn, Harriet’s memory of ‘a darkness’ around Ginny’s father, Wilhelm, the hints that Wilhelm,’ The Lemurian’, was immersed in something worse than merely criminal.

‘ Grey eyes that looked to the back of you with innocence and suspicion’. About Ginny, Ch. 1.

Tensions between Harriet, who feels artistically stuck, and Ginny, determined to know why her mother abandoned her father, play out in the creative field. Harriet’s art is rooted in the Bauhaus movement and Kandinsky’s artistic theories of line, point and colour, most particularly of the possibility of synaesthesia. Even while we readers wonder at the connections between two women, two daughters, on far sides of the world, we are also treated to a skillful portrayal of the need for art, the drive to create. Harriet and Ginnys’ creative battle itself shows the constant tension between the method and the artifice of it all on one hand and the desire to evoke something greater and nameless from it, on the other. Chromatic scales, in colour as well as in music, number theory, layers, curves, lines, correspondences, all tell their own story, combining into a new level as something the art ‘evokes in the beholder or listener’ (Kandinsky, Harriet). Or, could it be, as Ginny writes in her PHD on transformative experience, resulting in what the expression is ‘for the person expressing it.’ p.75.

‘Too many composers view composition as something that happens to the individual, not something the individual steps inside. She thought otherwise”. Ginny. P 120.

Here for you to absorb for more than one viewing is a painting, or perhaps a novel, of intricate characters and their inner worlds, the whole ridden through with an increasing sense of dread that something is going to go horribly amiss.

Step inside.

Where to find it: A Perfect Square is available through Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes and Noble and Chapters Indigo.

At Isobel Blackthorn’s website you can enjoy background material on her books, including music especially composed to accompany this novel, by the author’s own daughter and pianist. It’s available on iTunes, Spotify, and at Bandcamp.

Isobel Blackthorn is author of the Canary Island quartet, which has received glowing reviews: The Drago Tree (reviewed here), A Matter of Latitude and Clarissa’s Warning. Her dark fiction includes Twerk and The Legacy of Old Gran Parks and Cabin Sessions.Her collection of stories, All About You, Eleven Tales of of Refuge and Hope is reviewed here.)

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Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears. He is the writer-bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In.

The Drago Tree, by Isobel Blackthorn: excellent trip fiction available in Spanish and English

After the slow motion collapse of her marriage Anne seeks refuge on the jagged island of Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands off Africa.

Wounded, introspective, prickly – like the Drago tree of the title – Anne broods about her past, trying through writing in her notebook to exorcize the ghosts of her husband and troubled sister.

She meets the novelist Richard . He lives on the island seasonally, perched in his house as though at an outpost of progress, surrounded by artefacts made by the local potter Domingo. His plan to pluck bits of the islanders’ story from Domingo to use in his next book becomes, in Isobel Blackthorn’s hands, a parallel for robber cultures that plunder from others .

With Domingo and Richard, Anne explores Lanzarote, learning the unhappy story of its fragile population, the target of conquerors and pirates, and now of tourists. Anne both welcomes and distrusts Richard’s interest. He advances but exasperatingly retreats. Domingo just as infuriatingly holds his counsel. Unexpressed emotional forces heave beneath the surface, like the volcanic forces that shape the island. When they erupt it is in the form of their argument over tourism, whether it is ruin of the island or its salvation. This disagreement shifts the dynamic between the three, ultimately leading to a later plot twist.

A current running beneath the story of these three people is a meditation on the art of writing. Richard, seeing Anne’s notebook, thrust upon her his views as a professional writer. As Anne tests his critiques, expanding her notes, trying for her own voice, Blackthorn weaves them also into her novel, playing with them, taking us alongside the writing process at the same time as we are reading its results – this book. It’s a risk to skim along just inside the “fourth wall’ in this way but Blackthorn beautifully pulls it off. And when Anne confronts her ambiguous feelings about Richard, Blackthorn unexpectedly turns us further down the theme of exploitation, this time about where personal lives meet literature.

For readers who love layered levels of feeling and thought expressed in fine language, this is your novel.

Where to find it: The Drago Tree is available at Amazon; AND it is available in Spanish.

Often A Bounder: The Tedette’s Jane Austen Book Club reads about Georgette Heyer’s Heroes

Thrilled by Jane Austen’s novels, our Tedettes Jane Austen Book Club looked about for more books on the Regency. Their house (like every house, surely) turned out to be a treasure trove of novels by Georgette Heyer. They also got their paws on Jane Aiken Hodges biography, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (Chivers 1984 edition). Read about their discovery here.

The Tedettes get their paws on a trove of Georgette Heyer Novels

Heroes

Georgette Heyer created her heroes very deliberately. In correspondence with her publishers she gleefully refers to them in a private shorthand by Type, explaining for instance that a particular character is the “The Heyer Mark I” and another is “The Heyer Mark II” and so on. She’d skilfully build up such a Type, and the readers’ conceptions of such a man, and then two or three novels later, turn around the readers’ assumption by changing the decisions and actions of the Hero.

Mr Rochester: the prototype.

Jane Aiken Hodge found unpublished articles by Heyer, one of which will fascinate her readers (see Ch. 5 of the bio) as it concerns Mr Rochester, from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. This is Heyer’s own view of Mr Rochester:

“It is a accepted fact that women form the bulk of the novel reading public and what woman with romantic leanings wants to read novels which have as their heroes the sort of men she meets every day of her mundane life. (Mr Rochester) is rude, overbearing, and often a bounder, but these blemishes, however repulsive they may be in real life, can be made in the hands of a skilled novelist extremely attractive to many women.”

How ‘Fluffy’ was the Romance, really?

Hodge makes the case that underneath the entertaining friction and tension of her heroes and heroines lies an abiding principle: the protagonists are maturing through the pages into a rich and full relationship .

Heyer’s idea of romance never ends with “happily married”. Many of her characters get married off early in the book. It is the story of their growing mutual respect and understanding afterwards that interests the writer, and this must be the feature that kept – and still keeps – millions of readers coming back for more.

Antonia Byatt, in an article in Nova, stated,

” (Heyer) is playing romantic games with the novel of manners. In her world of romanticised anti romanticism … men and women really talk to each other … and plan to spend the rest of their lives together developing the relationships”.

In the Tedettes next post they will look at Georgette Heyer’s writing style.

The Private World of Georgette Heyer and more about Georgette Heyer are at Amazon, and BookDepository. Thanks for joining the Teddettes as they explore the Regency world of Georgette Heyer. Next they consider points about Heyer’s methods and style.

You are at Mark’s blog called Baffled Bear Books. Mark is a dark coffee tragic and bibliophile as well as the Guardian and blundering typist for Mawson Bear, Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears.

The Novelist and the General: Daphne du Maurier and Frederick Browning

Daphne du Maurier

The tale of how Major Frederick Browning met and courted Daphne du Maurier would seem to belong to one of the novelist’s less likely plots.

The Major had read Du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit. Inspired by her description of the coastline of Cornwall, and also dreaming of possibly being able to meet the novelist herself, he visited the county to go sailing.

He did indeed met her; and she liked what she saw. But as the months passed they both baulked for one reason or another at marrying. In the end it was she who proposed to him. The church they wed in was the very church where an important fictional marriage had taken place as part of the story told in The Loving Spirit. That fictional marriage in the book had been based on a real one. So a real marriage had inspired the fictional one in the novel, which in turn brought Major Browning to Cornwall, where he met and married the writer .. in that same church. It is like one of the loops of intertwined fates which occur in several of her stories.

The Bridge Too Far

As with all career soldiers, Browning’s army postings took him away from home often. As WWII advanced, he rose in rank to be a General. He believed in air power and he formed the First Airborne Division. This division served in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy and Normandy. By 1944, he commanded the First Allied Airborne Army at Arnhem. The battle turned into a ghastly British defeat.

Browning’s decisions during the Battle of Arnhem are still debated among enthusiasts of military history. Some claim much of the defeat was his fault. Yet, it was he who had given the famous warning to General Montgomery, to no avail, that Operation Market Garden was reaching for “a bridge too far”.

The General and his fuzzy travelling companions

The General ended his hastily scribbled letters home to his wife and son and daughters with “kisses from the Boys”. The “Boys” were his childhood bears who travelled everywhere with him, packed in a briefcase.

This material is from my reading of Daphne du Maurier, A Daughter’s Memoir by Flavia Leng. I stumbled on this memoir in my local library. Aren’t libraries wonderful!

You are at Baffled Bear Books, the blog of Mark, guardian,chocolate-fetcher and blundering typist for Mawson Bear, Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears. Mawson is writer bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In.

The Girl Who Reads On the Metro, by Christine Feret-Fleury

‘For some time, she’d had the feeling that life was passing her by, eluding her, thousands of grains of sand running through an almost invisible crack, taking with them thousands of images, smells, colours, scratches and caresses’. Ch.10

This is a book to read about books and about readers falling within the worlds of books.

The Girl Who Reads on the Metro is so lightened on every page by prose poetry that I marvelled it did not flutter away from me down the aisles as I read it … on the train.

‘Each book is a portrait and it has at least two faces.’ Ch 8.

This book I wanted to pass on to another reader as soon as I had recovered a little from the sorrow of finishing it – which meant, of course, I could never again relish it for the first time. But as this copy was a library book, I decided to speak of it instead, this being my own way of acting as Passeur.

‘So many words. So many stories, characters, landscapes, tears, decisions, hopes and fears. But for whom?Ch.7.

A book to make me forever intrigued by the possibilities of page two hundred and forty seven. Even if the book I happen to choose to read does not even go up to page 247.

A book for people who read books. Here, it’s for you.

Where to find The Girl Who Reads On the Metro (Translated by Ros Schwartz)

From Bookshop Org (supporting local bookshops) from Book Depository(with free shipping worldwide) from Waterstones. And of course from many more.

But really, for hold in your hands this book about the love of books, why not visit your friendly local bookstore to seek it out. And while you look for it – take your time – bathe in the presence of all the other books. (For more about the joys of Book Bathing, take a look at this little post.)

The books above pictured with The Girl Who Reads On The Metro are a portion of my own Yellow Submarine. What Yellow Submarine are you talking about, you ask. The one mentioned in the book!

Mark, your reviewer here, is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears.

Love and Home Grown Magic, by Patricia Bossano

When you hear the word ‘Magic’, what fills your mind? Stardust. Moonlight. Fairy god witches?

When you read the word, ‘Love’, what then sweeps your memories? Home, Family, Children, one’s first romance? Come, read this book, and let these things fill you.

The first time I read Love and Homegrown Magic it looked straight forward .. for a while. Here is the tale of a girl, Maggie, who grows to womanhood, falls in love, marries, and in time becomes the matriarch of an extended family. And the children grow and find love and marry, hard things sometimes happen, and love sometimes fades, and people die. But always dreams are nurtured..

Maggie dreams of her own garden and nursery enterprise. But ten years pass in raising three daughters, and then her husband, Angelo, insists on their return to their home country. A bleak feature looms. But Maggie rallies. She is sure her dream has heavenly endorsement. Beginning with tubs on the kitchen window sill, she creates the Jardines LunaRosa where the first roses- and Maries’ daisies- blossom from special plantings by moonlight by her small children. Reading this, I immediately saw and accepted that it was an enchanted garden.

‘Darkness cloaked the hillside home, but light, as if from a dozen chandeliers, spilled out of the kitchen window as the auras of the green witch and her daughters flickered in bright flashes to the rhythm of their chatter. … The stars looked down on their charges and twinkled approvingly.‘Ch. 23.

I read the book again; and again finished it with reluctance, because now it was over. “How does she do that?” I asked myself about author Patricia Bossano’s story telling skill. “How did she make it seem that way?” But you can’t look too hard into these sorts of qualities for fear the spell of it all, like dreams, will slip away.

Love and Home Grown Magic is indeed a story of family, for perhaps magic is created by ourselves at what we feel is home, if only, like Maggie, we look upon it that way.

Where to find Love and Home Grown Magic: published 2020 by Water Bearer Press: Book Shop Org (supporting local bookshops), Amazon and more.

Patricia Bossano has also written Faery Sight, Nahia and Cradle Gift. I reviewed her Seven Ghostly Spins.

Where to unshroud Seven Ghostly Spins: From Amazon in Kindle and soft cover, Barnes and Noble in Kobo and soft cover, also Waterstones. Hardcover editions are also available. Or, ask your friendly local bookstore to order it in for you, and for your friends who appreciate a frission of the supernatural.

Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears.

Poetry: How to Wake a Butterfly, by Loic Ekinga

The author wrote How To Wake a Butterfly during a lockdown, when he was forced to look at his life and retrace the many things that have nurtured his character. His starting point is the famous reflection by Zhuangzi that begins, ” Once upon a time I dreamt I was a butterfly ..”

‘.. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know if I was then a man dreaming I was butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.‘

Within a few pages I sensed something of an irony in that choice of quote, for it becomes clear that the poet has too rarely been conscious of happiness until recently. Even birth was traumatic.

‘ .. the baby (you) is out out of here .. its a boy/ its a problem/ its a screaming caterpillar … Will the baby grow wings/ he has known so much hurt already (How it Began). ‘

When he is about ten, mother leaves, leaving behind the boy and his brother with a hurt, silent father (‘We grew into hollow men, my brother and I’ ). Many years later he asks her why she went away (‘while I’m trying to hold her hand through the phone’).

‘I’ve found no comfort, son.
I left for you, because sometimes,
To save the hand, you cut off a finger’.

So young, he turns to comfort in prayers and religion but to no avail.

‘I was told, God listens to little boys’ prayers,
Yet I felt my heart sink and dry
On my pillow at night
Lke my parents’ marriage, In Jesus’ name, Amen.’
(On my Parents Divorce)

The poems move through Loic’s boyhood memories and he mentions terrible things – war, bombs, machetes. But he does not dwell on these. He reflects instead on the people who helped to form him: his parents, brothers, and in particular his grandmother. ‘Theres’s a father that never came close, A child that never left for school, a little boy crying in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. There’s an uncle telling him to man up, There’s a mother that never left a note ‘. Always he returns to the most important struggle of his life, as it seemed to me, to unlearn the silence that he had learned from his father.

‘My father taught me to be a wielder of silence’.

The sections on the poet’s early years and young manhood, Caterpillar and Cocoon, I found to be a challenging read, to be honest, with line after line sending me off on reflections of my own. However, in the last section, ‘Butterfly’, the poet emerges from the cocoon of heartache and doubts and is able to accept himself, He can allow himself not only to love but to be loved. And isn’t that what we all search for in the end?

So how do you wake a butterfly?

‘If you can, I say, – Without bruising its wings -With a hug’.

Loic Ekinga Kalonji is a Congolese poet, storyteller, and a screenwriting enthusiast. His work in poetry and fiction focuses on the human experience and memories.Loic has been featured in many online publications such as Type/Cast Magazine, Ja. Magazine, Poetry Potion, and The Kalahari Review. His experimental chapbook Twelve Things You Failed at As A Man Today was an honourable mention by JK Anowe for Praxis Magazine Online. His short story ‘Loop’ has been adapted into a short film. He is a finalist of Poetry Africa’s Slam Jam competition 2020. Loic currently resides in the south of Johannesburg where he reads, writes, and daydreams.

How to Wake a Butterly, by Loic Ekinga, is published by Ensorcellia, an imprint of Odyssey Books, in 2021
You can also find it at Bookshop Org, Amazon in Kindle and also in paperback, and Barnes and Noble, among others.

I encourage you to also look at, from Odyssey Books, When No One Is Watching by Linathi Makanda. See my review here.

Mark is guardian and blundering typist for Mawson, one of this bright world’s few published bears.

Stories by Rebecca Burns: The Settling Earth

The women in these stories voyaged from Britain to the ends of the earth, “the Antipodes”. Driven by hardship, propelled by hope, they left behind their old lives and strived to make new ones in New Zealand. But the settlers brought with them the same stultifying conventions and social constraints they had left behind. For women in particular, sometimes little seemed to have been gained.

Isolated on bleak farms or confined to soul-destroying boarding houses, these women are each at the mercy of men’s whims and male control of property. They live one slip away from destitution, and must reach deep inside themselves, getting past old ways of life and old conditioning, to do what they need to do to survive.

Each story is complete and satisfying in itself, and yet, like life, they are also connected by events or characters; so that the stories towards the end satisfyingly close the circle of themes raised by the earlier ones. The last story, by Shelly Davies of the Ngātiwai tribe, adds a Maori viewpoint of these arrivals.

I found The Settling Earth to be a fascinating perspective into frontier New Zealand and Burns new novel Beyond The Bay further looks into life in a raw new country as seen through the eyes of two sisters in Auckland.

Novels and short stories by Dr Rebecca Burns

Where to find The Settling Earth: Published by Odyssey Books, The Settling Earth is at Amazon, and Bookshop Org, among others. More excellent short stories by Rebecca Burns can be read in Artefacts and Catching the Barramundi. Her novels include The Bishops Girl and Beyond the Bay. See her website here.

You are with Mark at Baffled Bear Books. I am guardian and blundering typist for Mawson Bear, Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears. Mawson has his own website too, called (wiggles ears modestly) Mawson Bear.

The Bishop’s Girl, by Rebecca Burns

‘And then, as the cloth was split in two, long, black hair tumbled forth, still attached to grey bones, now wet in the midday sun. …Behind, a crow called accusingly.’ Prologue.

My first impression of The Bishop’s Girl was of a quiet story of frustrated lives as two scholars in hushed archives are stymied in their own ambitions by their boss. And this is indeed one of the stories threaded amidst several layers in this novel. But then it becomes clear that this no less than a cold case detective story. From few clues arise many questions. Why, for instance, was the Bishop considered so important as to be dug up from a wartime district and then reburied in England? How did an unidentified woman come to be buried with him? Who was she? The scholars, Jess and Billy, find hints and fragments in the old letters but will these leads come to anything? And I read on enthralled by the mystery of it.

As we learn more of the unexpected century old romantic connection with Greece, and as Jess begins an affair, I found myself reading for the tangle of relationships between lovers, between spouses, between parents and children, and all of their messiness and importance.

But now, with hindsight, I think this absorbing and satisfying novel is mostly a story of secrets, especially of secrets within families, and how they can have far reaching repercussions. It is a great read on all these levels.

Where to find The Bishop’s Girl which is published by Odyssey Books. At BookDepository, Amazon, and Bookshop Org, and Waterstones, among others. More excellent short stories by Rebecca Burns can be read in Artefacts and Catching the Barramundi. Her novels also include Beyond the Bay. See her website here.

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