Tag Archives: Will Yeoman

Review of Breaking the Surface

Breaking the Surface, Poetry, Reviewing,

I’m delighted with Will Yeoman’s review of my book of poems Breaking the Surface, which he describes as “a beautiful, sad, funny and technically dazzling collection.” The full review appears on Writing WA’s Substack, and I gratefully reproduce most of it here:

Perth-based author and poet Ian Reid writes of his fine new collection Breaking the Surface (Ginninderra Press), “This volume celebrates my return to the genre of poetry after a decade-long deviation into fiction, which included five novels along with numerous short stories.”

Readers familiar with Reid’s fiction will know that a deviation does not mean a forsaking of the poetic faculty, with novels such as The End of Longing (UWA Publishing) exhibiting a keen sense of rhythm and a marked tendency towards lyrical outbursts amongst the desiccations and depredations of history.

In one sense, then, Breaking the Surface represents a resurfacing of sorts; and indeed, notions of liminality and of the sublimated and the subliminal, of psychic thresholds, are given concrete expression in bodies of water, bodies of land, and, of course, the bodies of living creatures.

All such potentially weighty subjects are borne aloft by witty wordplay (puns aplenty!), amusing aphoristic utterances and a discreet musicality.

The poems are grouped into six generous sections. Take the first, Ruffled Edges: itself an ocean teeming with memories, reveries, losses personal and environmental, intimations of mortality and embodiment as a way of doing philosophy. Listen to this final stanza of Long after landfall:

You paddle over pebbles, bones of contentment

sucked at by sea lip: gleaming, outlandish

till waves withdraw, leave them to sun and sand.

Lustre drains away. They are dingy stones.

Belonging is an elementary matter.

Longing is what’s left. It’s on the ebb.

Shades of Shakespeare via Prufrock, alliteration and half-rhymes (“paddle over pebbles” has both for the price of one!), insistent caesurae… there’s a lot going on here. And the last line is a killer.

Compare this with the opening lines of the hilarious (but not) All thumbs from a later section, Filial Shadows:

The cleverest human features

come in pairs

like eyes and ears

like testicles and breasts

and so too with opposable digits

supposed to be the most

definitive trick of our species

a smart device that assists

fine motor skills and brings

precision to our fidgets

A lovely use of two- and three-beat lines and the full-and-half-rhyme line endings of digits/assists/fidgets underscores the comedy and the tragedy. The poem ends with Reid watching his grandchildren, “the first generation ever/to write with both of their thumbs.”

The collection’s first poem Wherever the body is and one of the last, The cat’s whiskers, are very different poems and yet equally heartbreaking. As, indeed, is the very last, De profundis, which for those who know WA Museum Boola Bardip’s Blue Whale will take on even greater resonance. Here’s the first stanza:

Some beings can’t long survive

above the surface.

Some singing belongs in the depths,

spreading and sinking fathoms down.

But it could also serve as Reid’s Ars Poetica. Either way, it’s a fitting close to a beautiful, sad, funny and technically dazzling collection.

A stroll down Podstreet

Interviewing, Podcasts, Poetry, ,

Usually we think of literature as something we read on a page or a screen. Yet the best literary compositions are intended for the ear as well as for the eye. In its ancient beginnings the creative shaping of language was often recited by a bard, and oral/aural ways of communicating remain fundamental for certain genres, especially poetry. Audiobooks have become a hugely popular vehicle for activating the sound of printed words.

There’s a sense in which writing should speak for itself — but we also like to talk about writing, and hear others do so. Book clubs and reading groups of various sorts are latter-day equivalents of the traditional literary salon, thriving on discussion of written works. And people throng to literary festivals so that they can hear writers speak — despite the fact that many fine writers disappoint us when they open their mouths.

So although reading and writing are essentially solo activities, readers and writers can’t stop gabbing with other people about their literary experiences. I’ve previously referred to this as the book-chat paradox.

One of the most common forms of book-chat is an interview with a writer, whether in front of a live audience or recorded for later transmission. In the hands of a skilled interviewer this kind of semi-formal conversation can be illuminating, as I’ve remarked in a previous blog post. WritingWA has been producing “Podstreet,” a series of podcasts that feature Western Australian writers and book industry leaders. To most of these podcasts the WritingWA CEO Will Yeoman brings his extensive experience as an interviewer. I’m glad to have been included. Here’s the link to our recent conversation about my latest book, Breaking the Surface.

 

The art of interviewing an author

Interviewing, ,

What makes a good media interview? I’ve been chewing over this question lately in the light of some pleasant encounters with expert interviewers. Since my new novel appeared a few weeks ago I’ve had conversations about it for a radio program, for a newspaper article, and now for television. They have all gone pretty well (from my point of view, anyway), thanks largely to the skill of my interlocutors – Tony Howes for Capital Radio. Will Yeoman for The West Australian and Meri Fatin for Westlink TV.

Recording with Ian 1 copy

There many sorts of interviews, and the tone varies according to their different purposes. At one extreme the language may be adversarial and even aggressive – e.g. when a political journalist tries insistently to cut through the defensive barrier of a parliamentarian’s formulaic phrases, creating a kind of tension that sometimes reveals (in the public interest, supposedly) more than the interviewee wanted to disclose.

That’s very different from the kind of interview in which I’ve been involved. The point of being asked to chat in a public way about something one has written is presumably to engage the attention of people who have read it, or potential readers. So the interviewer’s role is to win the interviewee’s trust, make him or her think hard about aspects of the writing process and the finished product, and elicit reflective responses that have will have some value when conveyed to others on the page or the airwaves or the screen.

By its nature, a literary work is likely to have enough complexity to lend itself to animated discussion – that’s one reason why book clubs are popular. So comments from the person who wrote the book usually have some interest, to judge from the fact that I’m getting invited as a guest to converse with various groups whose members are reading The Mind’s Own Place. An author’s remarks can’t control the way others interpret a piece of writing, but will often provide particular insights.

A well-conducted media interview helps extend that kind of conversation to a wider readership. What does “well conducted” mean in this context? For one thing, I’ve been fortunate that each of the interviewers mentioned above has been thoroughly prepared: they’ve not only read the book but also thought about it intelligently, and so their questions have been shaped in a perceptive and stimulating way. It’s no surprise that Tony, Will and Meri are adept at the art of interviewing an author, since  all have extensive media experience and a deep knowledge of the creative arts.

Engaging the confidence of an interviewee isn’t something that happens by chance. For instance, a few days before the most recent of these recorded conversations Meri Fatin spoke with me informally and at some length, by arrangement, about her impressions of the novel, about some issues it had raised in her mind, and about things she’d like to ask me when the cameras were rolling – so by the time the studio session arrived I knew generally what to anticipate. Thanks to her professional attention to detail, I was able to talk with her in a relaxed way – at least that’s how it felt to me; you can judge for yourself (courtesy of WritingWA, which makes the video available in this way) by clicking here to view our conversation on Youtube.