reviews

REVIEW
Ross Bolleter, All the Iron Night, Smokebush Press, 2004, pp 60.

Ross Bolleter's All the Iron Night is an impressive collection. This hardbound volume of forty poems is magnetic, solid and full of strength. The human fabric of home, love, and relationships is deftly conveyed. Strong images and themes of urban and country life and identities abound. His images of an outback landscape sit well with lengthy pieces that expose the saving grace of Zen Buddhism. Forms range from narrative and free verse to haiku and renga. The renga, Old Dog, is a collaborative work with Susan Murphy.

Bolleter is a listener as well as a careful observer. He's not afraid to expose his next-door neighbour's afternoon sexual encounter, the crescendo and ecstasy rising like a 'Rivervale afternoon chorus'. He wonders as he plays the piano, should he switch to Rachmaninoff or keep plodding up the hill with Bach, letting 'the Eb minor fugue/entomb you howling in its catacombs'?

The choice of It Can't be Praised Enough opens the collection with a strong motif of iron, also embedded throughout the collection. Beautifully pared down to just nine lines, we see the impresario attuned to the natural world, knowing how the wind creates a concerto of sorts in the 'express train's huge sorrowful cry', and in the gusto of windswept corrugated iron. Adept in composition, he contemplates this fragile world, and respects at the same time the high wind's sound and virtuosity:

                       That sweet ring!
                       It straightens the spine   lifts off the roof    unclenches
                       the heart   and as if that’s not enough
                       takes down the walls.

I wondered about this poet. In a review of his CD Crow Country, I discovered his unusual passion for ruined pianos, his writing and performance of original music, and his long association with jazz. He also teaches piano and volunteers his time to young artists, especially musicians. I was not surprised to find, through his teaching piano and improvising with students, that he has published his first book, Fostering Creative Improvisation at the Keyboard.

Bolleter's poems suggest a familiarity with those around him. 'Squeezes' sketches delightful aspects of games children play. In the game 'a train of squeezes', the poet connects us with young schoolchildren in a public world where hands aren't afraid to touch, to hold, and to squeeze. This world of fun and music and reverie instils in children a sense of power: 'children are stations/they have the right to change the direction of the train'.

Bolleter is a skilful imagist. His haiku capture the miniscule, yet hint at a larger meaning:
                       freezing loungeroom -
                       the mosquitos bite
                       comfort eating

The narrative poem 'Outback Piano' intimates that language can be heard, as well as read. The rhythm and sound are metallic. You can hear metal doors rattling, the iron roof soughing as the cold creeps in. There is the freezing shed, a musical instrument stored away under dusty rafters, where 'white ants have journeyed in concentric circles on the front panel of the Jefferson piano' (Chicago '26). And there he soothes the aging relic, tinkling magic into black and white keys. Imagine the sonority of loose or twisted piano strings!

But what makes a man journey to a sheep station in the outback, where in the middle of the night he records and plays an out-of-tune piano? Does he offer deeper cultural meanings of our throwaway, consumerist society? 'When I took hold of the fall to lift it, it was so rotten that it came away in my hands.' Or is it the thrill of bringing something back to life from decay and death:

                      I knelt, pulled back the bass strings and released them, like
                      firing off huge arrows. The piano roared and groaned.

Perhaps, it is a musician’s passion for sound, karma for the loved piano (he’s a Zen teacher) or simply the need to care and respect something that just “is”:

                       I would drag up an oil drum, feel the broken teeth of the
                      Jefferson under my fingers, then play con bravura con-
                       passione for the applause of millions of cicadas through
                       the shivery shuddering graveyard shift.

Bolleter's first poetry collection is a world for us to discover: history, family generations, giant clusters of events, scraps of fact in one's life that Muriel Rukeyser calls in The Life of Poetry 'the source of power. And that is poetry.'