turn the corner at the pub pass the drinkers sitting in the north morning sun like a chorus constantly watching
the bearded lady sitting outside The Skull’s house helping out on the weekend selling the bicycles he repairs
the Israeli bag sellers in the market hearing Hebrew as you pass with the occasional English word “Wednesday” for example
with Chinese students, more likely the English word might be “bullshit”
cycle past a friend’s garden papaya next to the olive tree
a big bush of rosemary, roses the little red flowers of the Chinese lantern bush
drop by Clipper café for breakfast “Hey I come to Glebe for breakfast at Clipper! I love Glebe!” peek in Gleebooks window full of beautiful book covers
she runs through the suburb in her mind scanning over the hills like on Google maps, satellite view
lived there, lived there, lived there each address like a portal opening onto those memories grouped like episodes the flat with a studio the flat with dark blue walls where she taught herself all those art techniques way back the feminist house
women with shaved heads in the big backyard the new flat with a fabulous balcony facing the highway on the opposite shore of the harbour watching the car headlights cascading down the hill collating a magazine round a big temporary table
I’ve walked the same street many times for decades living in the village even if it’s the city and times before carefree barefoot summers on the dirty asphalt never a shopping street reminiscent of the barefoot summers of childhood on the dusty dirt roads now paved that endlessness of school holidays and this place filled with creative lives when before that was only starting and then we were just learning trying to figure out what to do now it explodes round us then my faint hope of having an artistic life associating with artists realised on these streets tucked away in the corners of the village basement studios writers in coffee shops and a street full of live music since retail died
Sydney gives you space to breathe with its up and down hills and huge liquid ambers
skinny peninsulas deep deep harbour
anonymity lost in the crowd
trams that live on in Australian novels
my generations in the inner city
a blessing a curse
the city as it is lived
the Greek kids four brothers who built canoes from corrugated iron and tar to sink like a stone in Rose Bay
the glittering church windows of John Radecki Polish great grandpa nestling like forgotten jewels in corners of the city only discovered by us atheists fifty years later
Mum and Dad snapped in Lee Street just as it is today with the old stone wall the steep slate roof looking like Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in Spellbound especially as they were doctors and the shot was in black and white the excitement of the CBD all of us walking those streets different feet different decades across 140 years
Uncle Con’s café in George Street long and narrow and Con, ex-army cook frantic at the grill way down inside how did he stop customers from running off without paying?
John Radecki’s stained glass factory in Dixon Street near today’s Food World food court when the buildings were entirely blackened and grandma toiling to keep it afloat struggling with her heart condition and her proud husband
Uncles George and Con later on with the fruit barrow horse-drawn just outside the old Anthony Hordern’s building spinning those paper bags carrying change in those leather aprons
Auntie Nellie in the Oceanic Café for 65 years on the other side of Central Station Mum on the till pregnant with me strange she was taking time off her own work and 10 years later was working just up the hill
those Poles and those Greeks the place more like an American city for us seemed like we were in the wrong movie
Jon Anderson in Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces, Routledge, 2015 said: “Places come by their meanings and identities as a result of the complex intersections of culture and context that occur within that specific location.” Local, a fascinating book of poetry by the well-known artist and poet Anna Couani is about place. Place in Couani’s poetry is about Sydney and the Inner City and she has the knowledge, the experiences and the connection to allow us to say that she has a ‘sense of place’. That sense of place not only stems from the poet but also from her parents and grandparents’ experiences, memories and attachments. The poem “Earliest Memories” is a clear example of subjective memories or using the cliché ‘walking in her ancestors’ shoes:
my earliest memories of Glebe
my parents’ memories
of first meeting at Sydney Uni
studying medicine
my father recruiting Mum for the Labor Club
bastion of progressive politics
a heady mix of ideology and romance
Mum lived with her sister in as rooming’ house
in Arundel Street
run by Miss Sherack, the hoarder
of Depression era handkerchiefs, men’s underwear
and walks
common Glebe pastime
walk to the city, walk to Paddington
walks through the Uni especially
my own feet trading the same footpaths
30 years later
down all the way to the water
Anna Couani’s artwork illustrates local. Her life as an artist is also married to her poetry, evident in many of her poems. The joy of mixing with other inner-city writers and artists is also apparent in the poetry as is the fact that artists and poets are never too far from politics. The past of the inner city, how it was and how it is, is brought to light … nostalgia? … loss? … anger? is all made clear in the following excerpt from the poem titled “ibis sanctuary”:
the ibis sanctuary was there
before the new excavation started
and before that
there were ugly two-storey flats
and before that
there were workers’ cottages
before that it was an ibis sanctuary
Couani, in her entertaining narrative poetry, sees, reflects, describes, ponders and imagines. Vivid images, poignant lines, and a sense of balance moves the reader from place to place. The poet gives a voice to images. It impressed me how she is able to bring the personal into the poetry without sentimentality. The following poem titled “the flats in Leichhardt Street” illustrates this but also the strength and determination of the writer:
escaped from family trauma
dropped out of Uni, age 20
out of 4th year Architecture
a soft landing with my gentle partner
in hard places
finally found the flat with the dark blue lounge room
just near the old mansion
down in Leichhardt Street
that wound down to the water
turning off Glebe Point Road
exactly where the taxis do a U-turn
as I had done three years before
driving taxis out of the Red Deluxe depot
in Kings Cross
The last poems in the book are titled “ideas for novels” and go from 1 to 10. In these poems the reader enters moments, fragments of time, the land, life and culture. In local Couani gives a voice to images and place, she is an observer, a witness, the reader will be absorbed in her poetry. local is a ‘must read’!
About the reviewer Dr Beatriz Copello is a former member of NSW Writers Centre Management Committee, writes poetry, reviews, fiction and plays. The authors poetry books are: Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations At the Edge of a Dream, Under the Gums Long Shade, and Lo Irrevocable del Halcon (In Spanish), fiction books are A Call to the Star and Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria. Copello’s poetry has been published in literary journals such as Southerly and Australian Women’s Book Review and in many feminist publications. She has read her poetry at events organised by the Sydney Writers Festival, the NSW Writers Centre, the Multicultural Arts Alliance, Refugee Week Committee, Humboldt University (USA), Ubud (Bali) Writers Festival.
Anna Couani was born in Sydney in 1948 from a Greek and Polish background. She is a poet and writer of experimental prose. Small Wonders is her fifth book of writing and she has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She was involved in small press publishing and writers’ groups from 1975 till 1992. She was a founding member of No Regrets Women Writers Workshop that continued for 12 years. She was an officer of the NSW Poets Union for 10 years. She is also a visual artist and taught Visual Arts in mainstream schools and Intensive English Centres from 1972 onwards. She became a secondary school ESL teacher in 2006. She has degrees in Architecture, Art teaching and TESOL and trained as a painter. She is the partner of sculptor Hilik Mirankar. Some of her work is available for download from her website at: http://seacruise.ath.cx/annacouani/
Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe. Her recent publications of poetry (7 books in all) are Thinking Process, Owl Press 2017 and Small Wonders, Flying Islands Press 2012. She co-produced The Harbour Breathes with photomonteur Peter Lyssiotis. She was involved in the small press with Magic Sam magazine and Sea Cruise Books with Ken Bolton, Red Spark (with Kit Kelen & Mark Roberts) and co-edited various anthologies – Island in the Sun 1 & 2, No Regrets, Hidden Hands and To End all Wars. She edited a chapbook for Cordite called Falling Angels.
She was in the No Regrets Women Writers Workshop for 12 years and was an officer of NSW Poets Union for 10 years, organising readings at New Partz in Newtown, The Performance Space and other venues. She spent her working life teaching art and ESL in secondary schools, mostly in Intensive English Centres where she produced booklets of student writing and visual art and conducted collaborative script writing for plays written and performed by her students.
She has shown her artwork in various group shows at The Shop Gallery with The Pine Street Printmakers.
translations and ink drawings by Debby Sou Vai Keng
In National Library of Australia
Some time ago I was staring through a microscope at a sample of seawater from the Great Barrier Reef. Affixed to the slide, long thin active strands of streaming protoplasm explored this barren and flattened landscape, groping for detritus, microscopic signposts. This new landscape is foreign, less than a millimeter deep and blasted from beneath by a white light as hot as a drowned sun. Tracking the strands, I found their origin, an individual amoeba reaching out from inside an elaborately sculpted shell, hundreds of body-lengths away from the tips of these exploratory strands, called poetically pseudopodia or ‘false feet’. The maligned outsider scientist Sheldrake argues that ‘the sense of being stared at’ is real, and the extended mind behaves like pseudopodia. Not only does light enter our eyes or other senses, but the mind reaches out through them, touching that which is distant, drawing together those objects, people, landscapes, even memories it has explored, generating a vast synthesis, a view of the world that centers on a unique space-time address and connects web-like to all it has touched.
The poems in this book are like that. From the centre of a web of extended mind the poems reach out, like protoplasmic strands, across time and space, touching simultaneously the near and the far, Kochi in India, the arms stretched towards Turkey, between lovers-to-be who stare out at the same eye level from different Sydney buildings, protoplasmic strands delicately touching the past, the personal, familial, political, macroscopic or microscopic, probing the relationship between surfaces, the interior, the exterior, the individual and the collective, between whole cities and the minutia of urban landscapes, extending between cultures, lovers, philosophies, art movements.
local concerns itself with the local environment of Glebe, an inner city suburb of Sydney and with other areas of the inner city. Some of the poems were written as part of 366 Poetry Project. It traces the author’s family history and connections to the inner city and also addresses issues of colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people in Sydney. The book contains 13 artworks by the author.
Anna Couani, born Sydney 1948 from a Greek and Polish background, is a poet, writer of experimental prose and visual artist. She runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe with her husband, sculptor Hilik Mirankar. She was involved in small press publishing and writers’ groups from 1975-1992 and was a founding member of the No Regrets women writer’s workshop formed from the Sydney Poets Union. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has degrees in Architecture, Art teaching and TESOL and taught Art and ESL in Sydney high schools and Intensive English Centres for about 40 years. Her mother, Dr Stefania Siedlecky, was advisor to the Federal Government on Women’s Health and her Polish great-grandfather John Radeci was a prominent stained glass artist in Sydney and came to Australia as a teenager. Her Greek family migrated to Australia around 1919 and mostly ran small businesses in Sydney, in fish cafés, fruit & vegetable shops, and taxis. Her Australian-born father Dr John Couani, was a doctor who served the Greek and Left communities in Sydney as a general practitioner in partnership with Dr Stefania Siedlecky during the 1960’s & 70’s.
she
taping people from her village
The Peloponnese in an agrarian past
collecting voices that will disappear forever
then standing on this edifice
to look backwards
and then deeper, into the 18th century
now like a roaring train, a novel
the history of Greece, so tragic
she says
another she
doing genealogical research
first the family
the migrations, then back
back to the island
becomes
becomes a whole history
Ithaca
the Venetians
the Turks
the Byzantines
very different, she said
we had war
in one of her windows
the mandarin tree stands
in the centre of a brick paved yard
on another window
the lace curtain
shields the lemon tree
180° of glass
the vlita, the horta in the garden
this beautiful peaceful space
In another window
Skype video
I see them
doing genealogical research
and he also doing genealogical research
and the search on our name
a Byzantine tangle
a clan under the radar
maybe secret Turks or secret Jews
escaping the Inquisition
they had records, you know
the Venetians
so Ithaca is a different matter
I hold up the page of the book
to the Skype camera
this proves there were Couani’s on Kastellorizo
a page from this old book
strangely printed in landscape orientation
with the list of boat owners – Κουανης
and he
on video Skype
an English life
reaching back to France, Egypt, Africa
finishing an autobiography
I sit in her living room
a window opens
I see him
Sky
the fairy story effect
the magic of childhood
Sydney in a snow dome
possible because of its
bowl-shaped geography
ringed with mountains
girt by sea
its foamy cliffs
the sublime
people
miniature
the sky
so vast
the clouds so high
and puffy in the southern sky
the higher one, gleaming white in the sunlight
whiter than white is
is it so big
or are we so small?
showers coming and going
humid, then a shower
from above
the land is full of water and sunlight
a shower falling on one small area
shadows and sunlight
Reminiscent of Blackheath in The Blue Mountains and its fabulous summer alpine climate, air constantly washed clean by afternoon thunderstorms, sublime mountain vistas. The 19th century children’s novel, Heidi, set in alpine country. The snowy white bread rolls wrapped in crisp cloth and Heidi’s little gingham swag with her belongings in it. Heidi, so lucky to be an orphan.
people swim in the rain
raindrops cool on their skin
in the pale aqua water
The fact that it’s aqua because of the chlorine feels irrelevant, especially on sunny days. It’s not unlike the colour of the water around the Mediterranean islands. The pool, in the park just next to Broadway.
Broadway, Sydney’s busiest intersection, just erase the traffic and the noise and you’re left with a perfect landscape. I’m dreaming of turf being laid over Broadway like they did on the Harbour Bridge for a day, except permanently.
a flock of corellas
with their pretty call
circling
and doubling back
Broadway is like a bowl or part of a bowl that empties into the harbour at Blackwattle Bay.
Sublime, the depth
of the harbour
a mirror of the mountains
valleys that continue
downwards
but now, into murky depths
Is childhood magical? What is the temperature of the sublime? How we loved Caspar David Friedrich in the early 70’s! Before we were ravaged by Conceptual Art, that is. That’s when many of us stopped painting, when painting died for us, replaced by the minimal gestures of others, requiring no effort and almost no thought. Somnambulist Art. Work they did between hangovers.
The whispering quiet of the
valleys from the cliff tops
transcendent, individuating
rupture in disguise
the sublime thing
I could have gone that way
with feminist representations
some did
that’s where I was wanting to go
drawing female figures falling into chasms
so much like
classic Romantic images
it was men who dissuaded me
but 10 years later
similar images were
visible
in the art galleries
Vivienne Shark LeWitt etc
but then with the
imprimatur
of some art world bureaucrat
incommensurability
that was the problem
between them and us
I met people who understood why you’d want to rail against the parochialism of your peers
Australian Art
it’s a joke
and in Australian minds
it’s all happening elsewhere
distance creates the sublime
not that there aren’t fabulous artists here
but don’t tell me they’re Australian
So my work became
what was possible
maybe constraints help us
to map the unknown
aesthetic unboundedness
rupture
I made small drawings using pencil and aquarelle. Some like an abstract Reg Mombassa, some hyper-real. Learnt the Chinese method of watercolour painting. Wrapped up in teaching art to people who didn’t want to be artists. I took a holiday from history.
thinking
Communism, Utopia
group projects
where every offering
is valued
and adds
another element to the lexicon
The haunting
the bamboo pen
the ink well
vintage glass thing
with its pressed pattern
and three wells
the paper ready
the concertina book
carried around for weeks
where the practice drawing
will occur
also
the sketchbook
the real thing
started
cover done
title chosen
first poem
printed on tracing paper
and glued in
with spray adhesive
photos of all the objects
taken and uploaded to ipad
there
accessible
waiting
all the preparation done
the pen haunts me
I think and dream about
picking it up
I can feel the sensation
of moving the bamboo
across the paper
think about it constantly
imagine the black ink
sitting in the ink well
and about two other colours
as yet unchosen
I mentally scan the box of inks
think about the beautiful
senegal yellow
thick and glowing
everything is ready
and yet
the series consists of drawings
of objects from my parents’ houses
both parents now gone
so objects are not objects
it is essential to choose the colours
at least for the first drawing
the amber cigarette case
and think
is this a gestural exercise
or will each drawing
take on some complexity
become a painted image
become watercolour
water
always there
at the ready
to sooth
now that we’re really alone
‘Publishing 100 books in 14 years is no small thing. To do it as a not-for-profit, local, community-run (or even one man run as Flying Islands has been for most of that that time) venture with some of the most exciting poets in Australia and around the world, in multi-lingual, sometimes coloured or pictoral, and always affordable formats while maintaining a not-for-profit, art-centric, collaborative focus is just phenomenal.
The names here read like a who’s who in the poetry zoo. These are names even non-poets know, alongside more emergent poets from Australia and overseas and even a few translations. I won’t give you a list of famous names or the many poets in this collection that I’m already a fan of but I’m certain you will find some names here that give you a little fangirl thrill. Just to take one example, following is a tiny couplet from Jill Jones’ “In All This Queer Apparel”)
Time is just a detour
Pleasure without the arms of guilt
This book represents most, if not all of the poets who have been published with the press over its long tenure and is a great way to immerse in the variety of styles across a spectrum of poets, old and young, performative and surreal, experimental, lyrical, classical, and translated. This is a book to enjoy slowly – maybe a poem a day. I’ve been waking with one poem before getting out of bed and I find it is a gorgeous way to begin the day with language, as a way to stimulate your own work or to simply engage yourself in this extraordinary community of parties -let’s call it COP100 – the more impactful COP: a cabal, a collective, a force for connection. The work in these pages forms its own conversation, linked, through serendipity – by the first letter of the work, so that the poems near one another form their own conversation.’
The Shop Gallery, 112 Glebe Point Road, Glebe (on-site, Sydney).
Free event, all welcome!
To celebrate the launch of Brian Purcell’s Estuary exhibition at The Shop Gallery, there will be a reading focusing on poetry’s relationship with visual art – ekphrasis, typographical, and any other poetry where the visual element is key. It will feature amazing poets from the Flying Islands community: Richard James Allen, Angie Contini, Anna Couani, Christopher (Kit) Kelen, Brian Purcell and Sarah St Vincent Welch.
Anna Couani, born Sydney 1948 from a Greek and Polish background, is a poet, writer of experimental prose and visual artist. She runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe with her husband, sculptor Hilik Mirankar. She was involved in small press publishing and writers’ groups from 1975-1992 and was a founding member of the No Regrets women writer’s workshop formed from the Sydney Poets Union. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has degrees in Architecture, Art teaching and TESOL and taught Art and ESL in Sydney high schools and Intensive English Centres for about 40 years. Her mother, Dr Stefania Siedlecky, was advisor to the Federal Government on Women’s Health and her Polish great-grandfather John Radeci was a prominent stained glass artist in Sydney and came to Australia as a teenager. Her Greek family migrated to Australia around 1919 and mostly ran small businesses in Sydney, in fish cafés, fruit & vegetable shops, and taxis. Her Australian-born father Dr John Couani, was a doctor who served the Greek and Left communities in Sydney as a general practitioner in partnership with Dr Stefania Siedlecky during the 1960’s & 70’s.
