No apologies for cross-posting
But apologies if you get this twice and that annoys you
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REVIEW: red shifts / Maggie O'Sullivan
Etruscan; £7.50 / $US14.95; ISBN 1 901 538 25 7
distributed by Peter Riley (UK), SPD (N America) Collected Works (Australia)
A square book, well-produced, in colour. It's a size format I think that I
first saw in Bob Cobbing's _Bill Jubobe: selected texts 1942-1975_ from
Coach House in 1976 and which Etruscan used for Cobbing's _Shrieks and
Hisses_ in 1999; but that may all be coincidence.
It opens into a red-printed double page. On the left-hand, a thrice-drawn
line, pointing towards, on the right, on the title page, that is... a bat? a
rat or mouse? unexpected, visible, there, the way they are, we and they,
living in different coincident spaces, different realities, different points
of view, different movements and vectors. Us and words. Us and sight. You
and me.
Over, on the next page, a thin vertical twisting line, top to bottom, draws
a line "under" the title and continues the theme somewhat; then separate and
after (reading left to right), a horizontal jagged line.
Above it, text follows, up and down, child's mountains, rhyming the
thrice-drawn line in the previous double spread where each of the three is
following and leading the other two, a wavering trodden path, birds in a
flock, varying and repeating, drawn in red, red shifts.
The text, like clouds above the angular mountain line, starts "thrine"
(uphill) & "roam" (downhill). The book roams. I roam through the book.
Thrine! An invented word. Thine... through... line... What else? Enthralled?
Shine? (I, just now, checking this for obvious typos, think of D H
Lawrence's Paul Morel talking of the shine on leaves signifying their life -
a little sententious, but not wrong)
Elsewhere the text is also horizontal and centred, and left-margined and
right-margined, words in fields and systems, up to the edge of cliffs
created by the printer's guillotine, a double spread as one spread, text
block cut in two and falling each way away from the book spine, analysed;
"breathing breathing breathing" it says. Look at it again and I see ribs (of
"breathing") exposed, a torso fashioned from words and pages, itself each
other's companion...
"reach of the peacock's / blistering blistering thresholds" - How Maggie
O'Sullivan can write! (exclamation stolen from Forster on Austen)
Single and double pages drawn wordless, but not voiceless; and words found
in words, new lexicons: "fe(th)ur"
Stories forming. Not fragments of stories, but cells of telling, forming
into the told, swimming over each other, combining. The breath of the
author.
Red shift is a consequence of viewpoint in a world of relative motion.
Change standpoint and you change viewpoint. If you would see things as they
are, then you must see things from all points of view!
The view is partial, a red shift.
I am partial to this book.
Red shift is an indication that things are expanding, flying apart from that
maybe centre which may not hold, individual things become separate, more -
seemingly - themselves.
Emptiness of the observation room - "sometimes she cries", printed - type
text - alone, in the white.
Black on white, together, meditational.
All manner of cries! Figurative non-representational drawings in the text as
well as *of the text.
Land-texts.
I suppose I could be clearer, but I might be less true. There is nothing
else like this writing, though there is writing akin to it. *I feel akin to
it in my writing, or a desire to be akin to it.
I recognise it. I know where I am with it, as I do *not know where I am with
most other writing, a world I recognise when I am given the opportunity to
read of it, a world I could not have thought of without the reading. A door
in a wall. It is hard to speak of.
O'Sullivan has moved on and out from "In the house of the shaman" (Reality
Street, 1993), combining the painterly and the literary more fully.
Brilliant.
Lawrence Upton
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