Jennifer Maiden

This includes 'The Problem of Evil', a poem alluded to in 'Sphinx on Legs' in Liquid Nitrogen (2012). It's a narrative but, possibly typically of its time, is not at pains to make itself understood. It's still worth reading even if, like me, you decide not to make the mental effort required to disentangle it. As the book progresses through the six collections of Jennifer Maiden's poetry published from 1974 to 1990, there's a lovely sense of the poetic voice relaxing, becoming more show more open.

There's a lot to enjoy. One thing that struck me was the continuing exploration of evil, which reaches something of a climax in 'The Trust', a long poem in which a story-teller addresses a character in a story she is making up, a story that involves violent death and a suggestion of necrophilia. It's not so much violence and evil that is being explored, as our fascination with it. Certainly there's a lot in these poems that enriches my reading of more recent work: in them, violence is not only something out there, in other people, but something to be worried at in one's own heart as well. Take these lines from 'The Mother-in-Law of the Marquis de Sade' (from Birthstones, 1978):

To sit people on gas-stove jets,
to plug them into light-sockets,
to prod with sparklers, stand
them barefoot in buckets of dry ice:
I remember I devised
all these things in the bored
South Africa of childhood,
the shrill
Brazil that still entrances
the clean children next door

The Soweto uprising was recent when the poem was written, and Brazil was a brutal military dictatorship. The invocation of these regimes in the context of children's cruel imagining could be read as trivialising them, but I think the poem works the other way, against the trivialising of childhood: the big public violence that fills the news and the private unspoken and unacted violent imagining are part of the same phenomenon. 'Tiananmen Square', one of the seven previously uncollected poems at the end of the book, prefigures the way recent poems respond sharply and personally to what Martin Duwell calls 'media-experienced public events': it begins, 'I'm forty now.' Two of these seven poems, 'Aptly' and 'Chakola', mark the debut appearance of a major character in the Maiden oeuvre, identified in the latter poem as 'my three year daughter'. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/maiden-pirate/

Jennifer Maiden's previous book, [Friendly Fire], included a ‘cluster’ of poems featuring the ficitonal characters George Jeffreys and Clare Collins. Clare killed her two younger siblings when she was nine years old. George has been her probation officer and is now her mentor, friend and lover. As Jennifer Maiden explained in an introduction to the poems, through these characters ‘the horror-inhibited portions of [her] brain show more might speak’. First, in a prose piece, they were in the New York of 9/11. Then came the six poems, each of them beginning: 'George Jeffreys woke up in [Kabul/Kandahar/London/ Berlin/the White House/Baghdad]. / George Bush Junior was on the TV, obsessed / as usual with Baghdad' and then going to unexpected places.

In the five years since then, as seen in this book, she has written four more ‘George Jeffreys woke up’ poems (in New Orleans, Rio, Beirut, and a Pirates’ Ship), which are collected here along with one in which ‘Clare Collins woke up in the Paris Hilton’, eight in which Eleanor Roosevelt or Hilary Clinton wakes up somewhere, and one each for Florence Nightingale’s pet owl Athena, Mother Teresa and Grahame Greene, who wake up respectively ‘on the wild cliffs of Crimea’, ‘in London, at /The Inquest for Princess Diana’ and ‘in the Saigon Caravelle/ Hotel in 2006′.

That might sound like a bit of a bore, but it’s actually quite the contrary. Those first-line awakenings are launching pads for a wide range of poems: a couple come close to being straight action-adventure, others enter strange supernatural fantasy worlds, and always there’s a serious play with the big news of the day. (I would have liked the poems to be dated, which would have made it possible to find out easily at what stage of George W Bush’s foreign adventures the conversations in the poems were taking place. For instance, I seem to remember that the bit where George talks about torture in the Abu Ghraib prison was written before those sensational photographs were made public – and this surely affects how the poem is read.)

Maybe one day I’ll figure out why I love Maiden’s poetry so much. One thing that I can tell is that she writes about the public world, the one we see on the television, and makes sharp observations and judgements about it. Her portraits of George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice are wonderful. In this volume, there are Jim Cairns, Hillary Clinton and, most touchingly, Don Dunstan. She argues about the nature of poetry, and fame, without every disappearing up her own kazoo. She reports conversations with her daughter without going cute – in fact, the poems involving those conversations generally astonish in the way they bring disparate elements together. show less

It's clear from this book why Jennifer Maiden was included in significant 70s anthologies like John Tranter's The New Australian Poetry (1979), in which she was one of only two women. This early poetry is more compressed and elliptical, and in that way much more difficult, than more recent work, but it's recognisably the same mind: grappling with issues of violence, holding a public event or abstract concept up against an intensely private perception or intimate moment, refusing easy answers.

The two main characters of this book, George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, have reappeared many times in Jennifer Maiden's poetry since 2007 or so. Maiden said in an interview with Magdalena Ball on Blog Talk Radio that it's part of the conceit of the George Jeffreys poems that the reader knows these characters from previously, but it doesn't really matter if she/he actually does know them. All the same, if you're interested in those poems the book asks to be read.

If you avoid stories where show more terrible things are done to women, then stay away from this one. It's a pretend genre piece involving a serial killer in Western Sydney, which reaches a truly nasty and unexpected climax. I say 'pretend genre piece' because the serial killer scenario is secondary to the story of a gossipy, slightly sleazy group of public servants and professionals involved in the release and return to civilian life of teenager Clare Forster/Collins who had killed and mutilated her three younger siblings when she was nine years old. At the heart of this story is Clare's relationship with the narrator, probation officer George Jeffreys.

As I read the conversations between these characters, first as George is determining whether he will recommend Clare's release, and then as he is her mentor while on parole, I was reminded of Gitta Sereny's Cries Unheard, in which Sereny tries to understand the mind of child murderer Mary Bell. The Sereny book was published nine years after this, so it's not a source, and the books have very different angles on the subject of child murderers: Sereny asks how a child could have come to commit such an act; Maiden is interested in what life is like for the perpetrator afterwards – and what it means to be fascinated by such a person. show less