STEPS, by Maurice Scully, (Reality Street Editions, six pounds fifty, ISBN
1-874400-15-6) plops onto the breakfast table, and is wonderful. It's the
penultimate section of Scully's five-volume LIVELIHOOD (of which THE BASIC
COLOURS, Pig Press, is also part), and continues preoccupations of earlier
sections: observational, personal and economical survival. Scully revises
and revises his work so that the parts really do relate to the longer
whole, and little echoes run up and down the set each time a new bit
appears. The range of forms, as in any of Scully's work, is great, as in
exciting, including extended lyric tempered by angry rant, sonnets that
aren't, and little nursery rhyme bits: and it coheres ok, as they say,
there's a dynamism in the rhythm and the sound which is worth celebrating.
Here's a short bit which should reproduce ok in e-form:
RESPONSIBILITY
Washing her clothes in a rusty
old wheelbarrow by the dam by the
track under the eucalyptus where
the frogs at night fill the vill-
age air with/her bright brown eyes
and mouth connect in a smile whose
radiance and playfulness the fine
skin black/I thought I could get to
know almost everything once not quite
yet feeling the bounce in the net
(The Oxford English Dictionary of
Spraints, The Pretoria Encyclopaedia
of Mortgages, The Concise Cambridge
Political), when arcane thinking
clicks in its conduit. Tap: "an artist
is _never_ poor." Swallow that.
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RC
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